Word: viruses
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...swine-flu virus continued its gradual global march on Tuesday, prompting countries to strengthen efforts to stem its spread, while President Barack Obama asked Congress for $1.5 billion in supplementary spending to prepare for a possible swine-flu pandemic and installed the newly confirmed Secretary of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius, to help lead the fight against the disease. In the U.S., the caseload rose to 67 across five states - 45 of them in New York City, where health officials are investigating two new possible outbreaks at city schools - with more virus samples awaiting laboratory confirmation. New Zealand...
...pandemic? The most effective way of slowing a pandemic is to develop a vaccine. But doing so can take months. In the interim, antivirals may play a vital roll by making ill patients less contagious. When a person is sick with the flu, he or she "sheds" virus through coughing, sneezing and other excretions. Effective antivirals lessen the amount of virus a patient sheds (because the patient is not as severely ill) and shortens the length of time he or she sheds virus at all. Taking this into account, Neil Ferguson of Imperial College in London has used mathematical modeling...
...swine flu become resistant to these drugs? Yes, and that's another reason why health officials will want to limit their use to those who have become ill with the disease, according to Hugh Pennington, a virologist at the University of Aberdeen. Resistance occurs when a virus mutates in such a way as to render a drug ineffective. This is more likely to occur when an antiviral is widely used because resistant mutations are more likely to thrive and be passed on. A similar process has led to the widespread existence of antibiotic resistant bacteria such as MRSA...
Several countries tightened border controls and discouraged travel to affected areas - Cuba suspended all flights to and from Mexico - but the World Health Organization kept the pandemic alert level at Phase 4, still two phases below a full pandemic. Outside Mexico, the apparent epicenter of the A/H1N1 virus, there have been no deaths confirmed from the flu and relatively few hospitalizations, and health officials continued to preach the need for a calm response. "What we see in the United States, or have been seeing so far, has been milder," said Richard Besser, the acting director for the Centers for Disease...
...more cases and we expect to report on them," says Besser. "As this moves forward, I fully expect that we will see deaths from this infection." [Update: On Wednesday morning, Besser confirmed the death of a 23-month-old child in Texas from swine flu, the first virus-related death outside Mexico...