Word: viruses
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Swine flu, recently renamed H1N1 virus, is causing a swoon in pork prices. The Lean Hogs futures contract, traded on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), is down more than 10% since news of the potentially imminent pandemic first broke. The CME's Frozen Pork Bellies futures contract has suffered comparable losses...
...Fear and panic have gripped both traders and consumers, even though the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization have clearly stated that there is no evidence of contamination in raw or cooked meat. Although the genetic makeup of the H1N1 virus originated in pigs, the flu itself was not directly transmitted from pigs to humans. Ironically, there is at least one documented case of it going the other way: the flu has been transmitted from a man to a herd of pigs in Canada. But almost all transmission is human-to-human...
...lands on our doorstep. "Now is the time to take the actions needed to prevent this," says Nathan Wolfe, director of the Global Viral Forecasting Initiative, which looks for new pathogens emerging from wildlife. One way to start would be to trace how, when and where the H1N1 virus emerged from pigs into people (or vice versa - over the weekend, Canada confirmed reports that a swine worker in Alberta passed the H1N1 virus to pigs). The H1N1 virus contains human, avian and swine flu genes, and genetic analysis indicates that it reassorted years ago, meaning it could have been...
Given the speed with which the H1N1 flu virus spread around the world - and the relentlessness with which it has been tracked by the media - it can be hard to believe that less than two weeks have passed since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and World Health Organization (WHO) first responded to reports of an unusual respiratory illness...
...unlike diseases like foot and mouth, swine flu is not an infection that is automatically reported to national health authorities. Flu is common among pigs but not much more deadly than it usually is among people. (The H5N1 bird flu virus, by comparison, destroys poultry populations.) That means that flu infections in swine herds can easily fall under the radar, as seems to have been the case with the new H1N1. Though there were sporadic reports of flu infections passing from pigs to people over the past few years, "we hadn't seen anything that tipped us off that this...