Feature
2008-12-11
THE regal woman in a sari stares at the piece of paper and a look of
disdain spreads across her face. "Who gave me this number?" she
demands. A middle-aged man in the audience gingerly puts up his hand. Shakuntala Devi mathamatical prodigy, born in Bangalore daughter of a circus performer, her father was a tightrope walker and human cannonball.
Hong Kong cull continues as bird flu alert hits new level
( 2008/12/11 )
Health
workers in masks culled tens of thousands of chickens in Hong Kong
yesterday, a day after authorities raised the bird flu alert level to
"serious" following a H5 bird flu outbreak at a farm.
The outbreak near the border with the mainland
was the city's first in five years despite mass vaccination of the
birds, prompting concerns that the virus might have mutated.
"Viruses change and since 1997, it has been
changing. If we have been using the same vaccine since 2003, its
efficacy will not be the same," Ho Pak-leung, a microbiologist at the
University of Hong Kong, told Reuters in an interview.
Laboratories in the city were trying to determine the precise identity of the H5 virus that caused the farm outbreak.
Another expert said it was likely to turn out
to be the highly pathogenic H5N1 strain, which crops up regularly in
flocks in Asia, parts of Europe and Africa.
Although H5N1 is mainly found in birds, it may
mutate into a form that spreads easily among people. If that happens,
it could trigger a pandemic and kill millions. Even in its current
hard-to-catch form, H5N1 has infected 389 people since 2003, killing
246 of them.
shanghaidaily.com
The Mutianyu section of the
Great Wall on the outskirts of Beijing gets a dusting of white after
the first snowfall of the winter swept the capital yesterday morning.
Another cold front is forecast to chill much of the country over the
next two days and bring snow to Beijing, Tianjin, Hebei Province and
Inner Mongolia. Temperatures are expected to drop 4 to 6 degrees
Celsius in central and eastern China and 6 to 10 degrees in northern
China, according to the National Meteorological Center.