Word: yi
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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 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 full of syringes, swabs and sample vials. Working with the Guangzhou CDC and the Shenzhen CDC, he paid $6 for each animal he tested to an animal trader who supplied Dongmen Market. In Guangzhou's Xinyuan Market, Yi would...
...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 research led by one virologist, Dr. Yi Guan, 42, and the extraordinary measures he took to make officials aware of his work may lead scientists to new ways to contain a fresh SARS outbreak...
Almost every week for the past year, Yi, a microbiology associate professor at the University of Hong Kong, has traveled by rail up to Shenzhen and Guangzhou to carry out fieldwork. It was Yi, along with the Shenzhen Centers for Disease Control, 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 SARS coronavirus. That research, initially hailed as a breakthrough in establishing the zoonotic origins of SARS, resulted in the Guangdong government temporarily banning...
Instead, subsequent research by a mainland Chinese team challenged Yi's research, finding no evidence of the 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 of his genuine desire to apply his science to public health. Even more worrying was China's decision...
...When Yi brought those samples back to Hong Kong, a frightening picture started to emerge. Not only was he again finding the SARS coronavirus in a host of animals--the civet cat, as well as various types of badger--he was astonished, when he did the genomic sequencing, to observe that these coronaviruses had actually mutated to become more similar to the SARS coronavirus samples taken from humans during the outbreak one year ago. All this confirmed that the disease that had infected humans was again at large. The animals that showed the highest infection rate by far were...