Word: yi
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...noon in a hotel conference room in the western part of the city, Yi met with some of the province's highest health officials. There were representatives from the Department of Health, the Guangdong CDC, and the Ministry of Health, as well as eminent doctors and scientists from other institutions. Every man in that room had lived and worked through the first-ever SARS outbreak; many were clinicians who had watched patients whither, suffocate and die from the disease. Of these physicians, the most powerful was Dr. Zhong Nanshan, director of the Guangzhou Institute of Respiratory Disease. Famed for having...
...Zhong was willing to hear out Yi, 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 those four pages of genetic sequences, which provided the evidence backing up his dramatic assertions, were lost. Yi called his laboratory in Hong Kong and had the documents e-mailed to the Guangdong...
...Yi's hosts were skeptical of this notoriously impetuous virologist, remembering that it had been Yi, in the early days of the first epidemic, who kept on insisting, incorrectly, that SARS was a novel form of avian influenza. Even after the genetic sequences had arrived from Hong Kong, his mainland peers were unconvinced. "When someone is showing you raw data, you have to be careful," said Dr. Xu Ruiheng, deputy director of the Guangdong CDC. "You have to ask yourself, is this real or is this fabricated?" In turn, Yi asked his Chinese counterparts if they had the sequences...
...Yi's mentor, Rob Webster of St. Jude's Hospital in Memphis and a pioneer in establishing the zoonotic origins of many influenzas, says, "The research is solid, but still, Yi has certainly stuck his neck way out there on this one." Yi, as usual, is dismissive of any doubts. Back in Hong Kong, he explains how the virus found in other rodents such as badgers is genetically less similar to the strains found in humans, before vowing that culling civets "will break the chain of infection...
...incubation period for SARS is 14 days. The last civets were taken from the wild animal markets on Jan. 6. By Jan. 20, if no new human cases emerge, we will have a very good indication if Yi, and the Guangdong government, made the right call...