Topical News Lessons

©
Macmillan Publishers Ltd 2005
Taken from the
Magazine
section in
www.onestopenglish.com
Fill the gaps by using these key words from the text.
pandemic
virus
lethal
immune
experiment
laboratory
lungs
worried
1. If something is ____________, it is very dangerous and could kill you.
2. People use their ____________ when they breathe.
3. If you think
something bad will happen, you feel ____________.
4. A ____________ is an infectious disease that almost everyone in a very large area
catches.
5. If you are ____________ to a disease, you are safe from it and you will not catch it.
6. An ____________ is a scientific test to find out what happens to something.
7. A ____________ is a building or a large room where people do scientific experiments.
8. A ____________ is a simple living thing that can enter your body and make you ill.
Look in the text and find this information as quickly as possible.
1. When was the Spanish flu pandemic?
2. How many people died in the Spanish flu pandemic?
3. Where did the scientists produce a copy of the Spanish flu virus?
4. How much weight did the laboratory mice lose?
5. How quickly did the laboratory mice die?
6. What is H5N1?
©
Macmillan Publishers Ltd 2005
Taken from the
Magazine
section in
www.onestopenglish.com
Back from the dead
By Ian Sample
Many people today are worried about bird
flu. They are afraid that it will pass from
birds to humans and that thousands of
people will die in a pandemic. In 1918 a flu
virus killed about 50
million people around
the world. The virus was called Spanish
influenza (or Spanish flu, for short) because
Spanish newspapers first described the
disease. Now, after nine years of work,
scientists in an American laboratory in
Atlanta, Georgia, have produced a copy of
the Spanish flu virus. They are also going to
publish the genetic sequence of the virus on
the internet and some experts
are afraid that
other laboratories could copy the virus.
Scientists have copied the virus because they
want to understand why the 1918 Spanish
flu pandemic killed so many people. In a
report in the journal Science, Dr Jeffery
Taubenberger and a team of scientists in the
USA show that the copied virus is extremely
powerful. The scientists injected the virus
into mice and the mice began to lose weight
very quickly. They lost 13% of their weight
in two days and
all of the mice died within
six days.
"I didn't expect it to be as lethal as it was,"
Dr Terrence Tumpey, one of the scientists in
the team, told the journal Nature. In another
experiment, they injected more mice with a
normal type of flu. The mice lost weight at
first but then they got better and did not die.
The experiments showed that the mice with
the Spanish flu virus had 39,000 times more
flu virus in their bodies than the second
group of mice.
The scientists who
copied the virus say their
work has already provided important
information about the virus and helps to
explain why it is so lethal. But other experts
are worried that the virus could escape from
the laboratory. "Some people will think that
they have really created a biological weapon,"
said Professor Ronald Atlas of the University
of Louisville in Kentucky. "I am even more
worried now than I was before about the
possibility of a flu pandemic. The 1918 flu
pandemic started with
bird flu and that might
happen again today with Asian bird flu."
Some scientists are worried about the
publication of the genetic sequence on the
internet. They are afraid that biologists could
copy the virus using the information on the
internet. This could be very dangerous.
It took a long time to copy the virus. Scientists
used material taken from the lungs of people
who died from the flu virus in 1918. In a
second report in Nature, Taubenberger and his
colleagues analyzed
the genetic make-up of
the virus. They were surprised to find that it
was completely different from all the normal
human flu viruses. This probably means that
Spanish flu jumped from birds to humans and
did not mix with a human virus first. This is
very worrying for scientists because in the past
everyone believed that a pandemic was only
possible if a bird flu virus mixed with a human
flu virus.
Taubenberger says
it is very important to
know what changes in the virus caused the
1918 Spanish flu virus. This will help
scientists to work out which viruses might
cause a pandemic. The H5N1 bird flu in Asia
is already changing and it could infect
humans, he said.
Viruses have escaped from high-security labs
before. The Sars virus escaped at least twice,
once in Taiwan and once in Singapore. But
some scientists believe a pandemic will not
happen
even if the virus escapes, because most
people are naturally immune and there are
now a lot of drugs which protect people
from flu.
The Guardian Weekly XXX, page X