Word: kong
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With credit tight and customers scarce, chief executives from San Francisco to Shanghai are hunkering down, cutting costs and praying that they can survive the punishing global recession. But not Madhu Rao, the new CEO of Hong Kong - based luxury-hotel operator Shangri-La Hotels and Resorts. Rao, 57, is forging ahead with an aggressive plan to expand Shangri-La's 60-strong network of hotels, even as his business slumps. "We have one single vision," Rao says confidently, "to lift this [company] to another level...
...bird-flu outbreak. But until this week, China had reported no widespread outbreaks of the virus among bird populations, prompting concerns among some public-health experts that mainland health and veterinary authorities could be missing - or even concealing - the spread of the disease through poultry and wild birds. Hong Kong, where the first human cases of H5N1 infection were found in 1997, reported finding a dozen birds with the deadly strain of the virus earlier this year - a strong indication that the virus is very likely present in adjacent Guangdong province. But so far, Guangdong has reported no bird cases...
...China, plus new outbreaks among poultry in neighboring Vietnam and northeast India, indicate the likelihood of a firm presence of the virus on the mainland. Some experts worry that China could be missing the disease's deadly progression. Last week Dr. Lo Wing-Lok, an adviser to the Hong Kong government on communicable diseases, said the mainland had not been forthright about the spread of bird flu in poultry. "There's no doubt of an outbreak of bird flu in China, though the government hasn't admitted it," he told Bloomberg. Yu Kangzhen, the Ministry of Agriculture's chief veterinarian...
...more basic prevention in the way that live-chicken markets, prevalent throughout Asia, are inspected. Some worry that Chinese monitors may be calling for culls only when a large number of poultry become sick, as in Hotan this week, when 519 birds died. In contrast, last year Hong Kong culled thousands of birds after a regular inspection found only infected chickens in a wet market. The infected birds, experts say, showed no external signs of disease and could have been missed if inspectors were screening only birds that were dead or visibly...
...that other crises like global warming and the global recession have crowded the virus out of the news. But the disease survives - in the limelight or out of it. "The point is, this virus has not disappeared at all," says Malik Peiris, a virologist at the University of Hong Kong. "It kind of dropped off the radar screen of media attention, but the virus itself has increased its spread. It's not only entrenched in Asia, the Middle East, in Egypt, Africa, parts of India and Bangladesh. It's really a problem...