Word: yi
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...inside story of how that decision to cull civets came to be made, however, is one of aggressive public health, great courage and, most important, good science. It is very possible that the research led by one virologist, Dr. Yi Guan, 42, and the extraordinary measures he took to make government officials aware of his work may have averted another disastrous SARS outbreak...
...Almost every week for the past year, Yi, a microbiology associate professor at the University of Hong Kong (HKU), has been taking the old Kowloon-Canton Railway up to Shenzhen and 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...
...Instead, subsequent research by a mainland Chinese team challenged Yi's research, finding no evidence of the SARS coronavirus in civets. Meanwhile, other scientists murmured that Yi's data was based on too narrow a range of samples drawn from just one market. Perhaps those civets, some argued, had been infected by humans in that market, rather than the other way around. For Yi, a hot-tempered, chain-smoking workaholic, this was an unbearable impugning not just of his research but also his genuine desire to apply his science to public health. Even more worrying was the Chinese government...
...Despite the doubts cast by other scientists, Yi was still sure there was SARS coronavirus in wildlife markets. Taking into account the possibility that seasonality was a factor in the replication of the SARS coronavirus, he waited until October?about a year since the first cases appeared?and began returning to the Guangdong wild animal markets every week with his black satchel bag full of syringes, swabs and sample vials. Working with the Guangzhou CDC and the Shenzhen CDC, he paid $6 for each animal he would test to an animal trader who supplied Dongmen Market. In Guangzhou's Xinyuan...
...late December, Yi was sitting in his apartment in 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...