IOWA CITY —
"Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world;
yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our
heads from a blue sky." — Albert Camus, "The Plague"
In May, 1997, a 3-year-old boy was admitted to an ICU in Hong Kong
after suffering from influenza for a week. Two days later, the boy died
of pneumonia. His case would have been merely a curiosity if it weren't
for 17 more patients who came down with the illness months later. In
all, six people died from a strain of influenza that had never been seen
in humans before, dubbed H5N1.
However, H5N1 wasn't really "new." It had caused outbreaks in Scottish
chickens in 1959 and British turkeys in 1991. It had killed geese in
Guangdong, China, in 1996. But these bird outbreaks weren't considered
important by physicians or researchers on human disease — this was an
avian strain of influenza, and it was thought that humans had little to
be concerned about.
That changed abruptly in 1997, when the human cases led to the
destruction of 1.3 million chickens in Hong Kong to stop the outbreak.
That strategy seemed to work in the short term, but H5N1 has since
surfaced in more than two dozen countries and caused more than 600 human
infections since 1997 — almost half of them fatal.
Continued: http://clintonherald.com/topnews/x983018961/How-animals-spread-diseases-to-us
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