Word: viruses
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...disease outbreaks, diagnose them properly and get word out on the medical wires is central to managing crises like anthrax as well as more routine problems like Lyme disease, tuberculosis and the flu. Emergency rooms often perform this function in an ad hoc way; the emergence of West Nile virus in New York City was first detected by a hospital physician who was suspicious of two cases of encephalitis among her patients and prodded the city health department to launch an investigation. The CDC relies on a national network of sentinel doctors to do this kind of monitoring during...
...settlement to establish five new health departments that cover 19 of the state's 93 counties. Texas is relying on revenue from the state's telecommunications fund to wire itself for the Health Alert Network. Georgia, which had been given CDC grants to fight such problems as West Nile virus and emerging infections, decided that the best way to do that was to hire a new team of epidemiologists to keep an eye out for all these ills. Such self-sufficiency at the state level will not only make grass-roots disease tracking more efficient but also make local authorities...
...MOUSEPOX VIRUS...
...accidental discovery, but it could hardly be called serendipitous. By adding a single gene to its DNA, Australian researchers turned a mousepox virus that normally causes only mild symptoms in rodents into a virulent killer that wiped out all their lab mice in less than 10 days. Alarms were sounded, not over the prospect of mouse plague but out of concern that rogue scientists might use the technique to create human pathogens even more lethal than anthrax or smallpox...
...Anthrax was bad enough, but smallpox in the hands of terrorists could make a far more devastating bioweapon. There is no effective treatment for the disease, and because routine vaccination was halted in 1972, even a single case could spread like wildfire. Officially, the only remaining sources of the virus are small quantities kept at two secure labs in the U.S. and Russia. Experts believe, however, that Iraq, North Korea and Russia may have secretly pursued weapons research that involved smallpox. Erring on the side of caution, the White House has ordered 300 million doses of the vaccine, enough...