Word: yi
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...late December, Yi was sitting in his apartment in Hong Kong, smoking 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 leap. But it could take months to get a paper peer-reviewed and published so it would impact public health by encouraging the Guangdong government to curtail the civet population--or at least limit contact between humans and the animal. In that time, the disease could again gain a foothold...
...Yi believes deeply in the future of the People's Republic and is forgiving of its occasional foibles, dismissing malfeasances, such as last year's early cover-up of the outbreak, with a shrug. The many top officials he has met, he believes, will always do what is right if they have the relevant information. The problem is getting that data in front of them...
...Yi framed a simple letter to Beijing's Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office, which he also sent to the Ministry of Health and the China CDC. "With winter coming, the wildlife markets have reopened, providing the perfect conditions for another outbreak of SARS," he wrote. He went on to list his findings that the civet is the major carrier of the SARS coronavirus, that the SARS coronavirus exists in different animals from different regions, that this virus can infect humans and, most frightening, that the "transmitting mechanism for the resurgence of SARS is in place." He enclosed four pages...
...noon that day, Yi met with some of the province's highest health officials. Every person in that room had lived and worked through the first-ever SARS outbreak, and many were clinicians who had watched patients wither, suffocate and die from the disease. Of these physicians, the most powerful was Dr. Zhong Nanshan, 67, director of the Guangzhou Institute of Respiratory Disease. Famous for having been a physician to China's late leader Deng Xiaoping, Zhong had also pioneered the earliest clinical treatments of SARS, emerging as the doctor most associated with fighting, and eventually defeating, the disease...
Zhong was willing to hear Yi out, but where was his evidence? All they had, another public-health official explained, was this letter of warning, which, frankly, seemed a little hysterical. As the letter had been passed down from the Ministry of Health, somehow the four pages of genetic sequences, which provided the evidence backing up his assertions, had been lost. Yi called his laboratory in Hong Kong and had the documents e-mailed...