Word: webster
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Webster and Shortridge are convinced that the avian virus is still circulating in the environment. "I don't think we're out of the woods yet," says Shortridge. Fukuda agrees: "You would be a fool to predict what the virus is going to do next. I'm equally prepared for this thing to disappear as I am to hear one day when I walk into the office, 'Oh, did you hear? There's another 10 cases--or 100 cases...
...Webster, it was a striking moment--the first time he had ever been invited to the meeting, a point he made clear in the opening moments of his talk. Equally striking, no one on the panel tried to minimize the potential danger of the new avian virus. Far from it. In a vote the FDA had not even requested, the committee unanimously agreed to move ahead to develop a vaccine against H5, even take it through clinical trials...
Shortly before the vote, Webster was asked his opinion. He believes the Hong Kong Incident may have given the world early warning of more H5 outbreaks to come. "We have a window of opportunity," he told the assembled scientists...
...aches most people associate with flu. Virologists say the decision to kill all the chickens in Hong Kong--widely derided at the time--was in fact the smartest thing that could be done and that it might have prevented a more widespread disaster. "The question is," says Robert Webster, chairman of the virology department at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tenn., and a key actor in the quiet drama played out in Hong Kong, "did they close the stable door before or after the horses had gone...
...Hong Kong Incident, as Webster calls it, arrived with cinematic timing--an almost supernatural confluence of event and inquiry. It occurred amid heightened sensitivity to the dangers of newly emerging viruses and just as several teams of researchers were closing in on the mysterious 1918 "Spanish flu," which killed more than 20 million people. At the same time, it turns out, public-health officials were quietly intensifying plans for the next great global epidemic, or pandemic...