Summary of: “Trailing a Virus”, by W. Wayt Gibbs
This article is about a viral outbreak that occurred sometime in the year 1999 out in the country in Malaysia. This is a virus that has killed 110 people already and forced the Asian governments to destroy the million or so infected swine in the area. The person who made the initial discovery of the virus is Chua Kaw Bing. Bing is an expert in the field of viral outbreaks and always flies to the origin of any outbreaks. In February of 1999, he was sent to Perth to that an outbreak of some virus had enlarged the joints of 27 people with high fevers in Port Klang. However, a month later, Chua went to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention labs in Fort Collins, Colorado, to determine what the unknown virus is using high-tech tools. During his flight from just outside of Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia, he saw the pastures in Ipoh where the disease may have originated. It was reported that there were 26 victims of this new disease just from this area alone. No one had seen such an epidemic in Malaysia in over 25 years. Scientists agreed that the virus must have been Japanese encephalitis, but that would soon prove to be false. The virus quickly spread south to Negri Sembilan which was the main supplier of the Malay
He found that the virus grew very rapidly by itself and he saw that it was killing the monkey cells. However the insect organisms injected with the virus stayed normal. This is significant because it shows without a doubt that this virus could not possibly be contracted from insects to people. Chua checked the virus for several types of other diseases it could be but all his results came back negative. After these results they had concluded that this was a new virus. When Chua saw this, he immediately flew to the U.S. with the unknown virus for help but experts there told him this viral disease was completely new to the medical field. So Chua and Lam named the new virus Nipah after a village where from his sample virus was grown by a man that was infected. However, the Nipah virus shared 82% of its DNA with a virus named Hendra which is spread by fruit bats. Therefore, the CDC classified the disease as a Biosafety Level 4 which means that there is not a great cause of concern for a massive outbreak. Even with the identification of the virus, scientists continue to struggle to find out what this virus does, how it can be transmitted and what natural host the Nipah virus originates from. sian pig industry. Apparently farmers thought it would be a good idea to smuggle pigs past the quarantine zone just to make some money but spreading the virus was making things increasingly worse. This
Some topics in this essay:
Negri Sembilan,
JE Chua,
Meanwhile CDC,
Chua Lam,
Lumpur Malaysia,
,
Bing Bing,
Biosafety Level,
Collins Colorado,
japanese encephalitis,
Control Prevention,
nipah virus,
virus chua,
virus japanese,
unknown virus,
virus possibly,
injected virus,
virus japanese encephalitis,
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Approximate Word count = 950
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)
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