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  3. The virus came to official attention in a bag of dead chickens. Early in March 1997, a farmer from Hong Kong’s New Territories c

The virus came to official attention in a bag of dead chickens. Early in March 1997, a farmer from Hong Kong’s New Territories c

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问题     The virus came to official attention in a bag of dead chickens. Early in March 1997, a farmer from Hong Kong’s New Territories carried them into the Agriculture and Fisheries Department laboratory. Something had caused their internal tissues to hemorrhage. The result in some cases was hideous and bloody.
    By the time inspectors reached his farm, most of the birds were dead. Cultures of their organs revealed they had died of avian influenza, type H5N1.
66.______
    Then came more bad news. A three-year-old boy died of flu complications in a Hong Kong hospital. The virus was diagnoses as H5N1. Flus of the H5 subtype had never been known to infect humans. It wasn’t over. In the next seven months, 168 Hong Kong residents fell ill with H5N1 and six died.
    In late December, public-health officials took a drastic step, ordering the slaughter of every chicken in every farm and marketplace in Hong Kong. The H5N1 virus seemed to disappear—but for how long?
    Flu is one of the most changeable viruses known to man. After we’ ye been sick with one strain, it can mutate to infect us again. We are only immune to flus our bodies have seen before.
67.______
    Birds carry the flu virus in their intestines and excrete it in their feces. In all likelihood, shopper who got sick with H5 touched surfaces contaminated with chicken feces. Humans, however, carry flus in their respiratory tracts and usually spread them in a cough of sneeze. Flus that travel this way are highly contagious.
    The H5 virus in Hong Kong was different. It sickened very few, but killed a third of them. Most who got sick with H5 seemed to catch it directly from a bird they bought in a live-poultry market.
68.______
    That was the peak year of the greatest pandemic in recorded history, which in less than two years took at least 21 million lives. Three waves of Spanish flu—so named because it was at first erroneously thought to have started in Spain w swept the globe. Virtually everyone was infected, and up to 3 percent of them died.
69.______
    Geographic isolation was no protection. In the Alaska Territory, the mortality in some villages was as high as 90 percent. All told, at least 500,000 Americans perished.
    The virus that became Spanish flu probably came from a bird, although experts disagree slightly about how it may have happened. Avian-flu expert Dr. Robert Webster of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tenn., believes the virus may have leapt straight from birds to humans, possibly a year or two before the pandemic began. Once lodged in human lungs, it quickly passed from person to person in a simple cough or sneeze.
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    "We may never have another pandemic", notes Dr. Edwin D. Kilbourne of New York Medical College in Valhalla, N.Y. "But it’s only right to plan for one as if it were going to happen tomorrow". If it did, we could be caught by surprise and quickly overwhelmed. To avoid that grim possibility, here are three measures all nations need to take:
    Better surveillance. When a pandemic starts, every day will count.
    More vaccines and flu shots.
    A strong pandemic plan.

A. A flu can also "jump" to an animal it has never infected before. Once such a flu moves into humans, if it can "learn" to pass easily between them, it can spark a pandemic—a global outbreak.
B. After the Hong Kong outbreak, flu experts feared that H5—already deadly to humans—might learn to move between them as well. That "raise the specter of 1918", says Nancy Cox, Chief of the Influenza Branch of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
C. In April there were outbreaks at two more farms. Mortality was nearly 100%.
D. An avian flu infected humans recently. It could combine with human flu to produce a lethal new virus. The H5 and N1 spikes help the virus invade cells that line the gastrointestinal tract of chickens. The virus is deadly.
E. Dr. Jeffery Taubenberger, of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, asks the critical question: "What if what happened in Hong Kong in 1997 was what happened somewhere in the world before 19187" The first wave of the Spanish flu traversed the globe in four months. Today, a flight from Hong Kong to London takes 14 hours. Up to 225 international flights leave daily, each carrying as many as 400 passengers to as many as 110 locations around the world.
F. The toll was frightful. In Philadelphia, for example, some 2600 perished in the second week of October and 4500 in the third week. The city’s only morgue had several hundred bodies piled three and four deep, unembalmed, in the corridors.

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