Word: zhong
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...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. He is the best-known doctor...
...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...
...their computer modeling programs to analyze the amino-acid sequences to reconstruct the evolutionary origins of this year's virus. That way, they would be able to compare the two and determine more precisely the real risk level. If the two phylogenetic trees were similar, Yi explained (and Zhong concurred), it would confirm that the disease was again afoot and, in this case, was certainly related to the wild-animal markets. The Guangzhou officials agreed. The new case's sequences were sent and the men drank tea and smoked while waiting for Yi's lab to complete the computer modeling...
...Zhong was the only one in that room with the clout to make the call. The situation was simple: the wild-animal business in Guangdong was estimated to be worth anywhere from $100 million to $200 million a year; the economic impact of another SARS outbreak, however, was immeasurable. Zhong called on Jan. 4 and later that day an order was issued to launch a campaign to eradicate civets from the province's farms and markets. By the next morning, said Peng Shangde, deputy director of the Guangdong Forestry Department, "we were staffed and the trucks were rolling...
...There was only one man in that room with the clout and reputation to recommend a measure this extreme. Zhong was delegated to call Governor Huang Huahua. The argument he could give was simple: the wild animal business in Guangdong was estimated to be worth anywhere from $100 million to $200 million a year; the economic impact of another SARS outbreak, however, was immeasurable. Zhong made that call on Sunday. He can be very persuasive: the order was given later that day to the Guangdong Health Department and the Guangdong Forestry Department, among other agencies, to launch a campaign...