Word: viruses
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...Guangzhou to carry out his fieldwork. It was Yi, along with the Shenzhen Centers for Disease Control (CDC), who in May took samples from Shenzhen's Dongmen Market and made the discovery that the masked palm civet, as well as the raccoon dog and hog badger, carried a virus remarkably similar to the coronavirus that causes SARS. That research, initially hailed as a breakthrough in establishing the zoonotic origins of SARS, resulted in the Guangdong government temporarily shutting down the wildlife markets and banning the sale of civets. For Yi, who attended medical school at Nanchang Medical College in Jiangxi...
...When he brought those samples back to Hong Kong, a frightening picture started to emerge. Not only was he again finding the SARS coronavirus in a host of rodent species?in addition to the civet cat, he also detected the virus in hog badgers, Eurasian badgers, raccoon badgers and ferret badgers?he was astonished, when he did the genomic sequencing, to observe that these coronaviruses had actually mutated to become more similar to the SARS coronavirus samples taken from humans during the first outbreak last spring. All this confirmed that the disease that had infected humans was again at large...
...Hong Kong, on his leather sofa, watching his big-screen TV, smoking his Mild Seven cigarettes and wondering about his way forward. It was only a matter of time before another outbreak would occur, he now believed. There was simply too much interaction between humans and civets for this virus not to make the jump. But it could take months to get a paper peer-reviewed and published that could impact public health by encouraging the Guangdong government to curtail the civet population or at least limit contact between humans and this animal. In that time, the disease could again...
...winter coming, the wildlife markets have reopened, providing the perfect conditions for another outbreak of SARS," he wrote. He went on to list his findings that the civet is the major carrier of the SARS coronavirus, that the SARS coronavirus exists in different animals from different regions, that this virus can infect humans and, most frightening, that the "transmitting mechanism for the resurgence of SARS is in place." He enclosed four pages of genetic sequences taken from civets and had the letter hand-delivered on Jan. 2. Within hours the Ministry of Health in Beijing passed the letter...
...implications of the current case are so troubling that the diagnosis has been taken out of local hands. Unlike the previous laboratory-based SARS infections in Taiwan and Singapore, the patient in this instance had no known contact with the virus. The pressing question is where did this infection come from? "If this is SARS," says Huang Wenjie, director of respiratory diseases at Guangzhou General Military Hospital, "that means it is out in the community, and this may be a seasonal disease." One that, in all likelihood, won't be eradicated any time soon. The WHO is awaiting another series...