Word: viruses
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...meantime, we wait to see if SARS can adapt with the same deadly efficiency as influenza?and once a virus achieves airborne transmission from one person to another, the consequences might be as brutal as the 1918 flu that killed one in 60 of all the people on earth. Perhaps if we knew that SARS had come from another species, we could identify how it had changed and we could design drugs or vaccines to tackle it. By the time we had produced them, however, the disease would already have done its deadly damage. Once again, we find ourselves...
...Thompson. "Maximum efforts in the beginning are justified." Although doctors and scientists decline to point fingers, it's increasingly clear that the Hong Kong government failed to recognize the potential threat when SARS first surfaced and downplayed its impact to avoid panic and bad publicity. As a result, the virus slipped into the general population?and the number of Hong Kong victims continues to rise steadily. There were 26, 27 and 39 new cases reported on April 3, 4 and 5, respectively, bringing the total number since the outbreak began to 800, with 20 deaths. Far from being contained...
...Virus Spreads...
...Local health officials credit the full-court press they clamped on the virus. Those measures included quarantining more than 1,500 people who had close encounters with SARS victims, confining them to their homes under threat of heavy fines; closing all schools, and medical screening for all travelers entering the city. When new cases were discovered, a team of 100 "contact tracers" tracked down not only patients' immediate families, friends and neighbors but also their office colleagues and favorite food hawkers, and placed them in quarantine, too. Anyone suspected of having SARS is transported to the hospital in an ambulance...
...settlements are the evacuated residents of Block E of Amoy Gardens, a crowded Hong Kong housing estate that has become the most virulent breeding ground yet for the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) outbreak. In barely a week more than 250 residents of Amoy Gardens contracted the potentially deadly virus?nearly half of them are from Block E. On April 1, health officials gave Block E occupants a couple hours' notice before busing them to their new countryside digs. Now, they have traded their possibly virus-ridden apartments for temporary housing that might also be as conducive to spreading...