Word: websters
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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...
...three farms in Hong Kong's rural New Territories. Because poultry is a vital part of Hong Kong's diet, agricultural authorities got concerned and quickly consulted Kennedy Shortridge, a microbiologist at the University of Hong Kong. He in turn contacted his friend and fellow flu specialist Robert Webster of St. Jude. For decades both men had studied influenza viruses in chickens and other birds in the belief that these viruses were more than just an agricultural problem and might hold the key to the origins of human influenza, possibly even the virus...
Shortridge and Webster immediately recognized the gravity of the chicken-flu outbreak in Hong Kong, at least for the region's chicken industry. They knew that while avian influenza did not ordinarily make its host sick, a benign virus could reassort to produce a pathogen of almost inconceivable lethality. Webster's Memphis lab had observed such a transformation in the wild on two occasions, the first in April 1983, when a relatively mild influenza struck chickens on the vast chicken farms of Pennsylvania. The birds got visibly sick, some died and egg production fell, but overall the outbreak remained only...