"It's the usual suspects that are most likely to have helped the virus get a foothold in humans - travel, population increases and human practices such as unsafe healthcare interventions and prostitution.
If manufacturing groups are hesitant to act, if government inspectors are easily bribed, if labor unions are yet to find a foothold, if human consciences are easily held in abeyance, what can make an owner improve conditions?
Then again, he's seriously concerned that a similar virus sooner or later will get a foothold in humans.
Although it's well known that Typhimurium can piggyback on HIV, the case made in the Nature Genetics paper is that this Salmonella serovar got a foothold in the human population and became epidemic only because of the AIDS virus a thesis that relies on several assumptions.
Fortunately, none of the recent viral threats from the animal reservoir (avian influenza, SARS) has succeeded in getting a definitive foothold in the human population.
Monitoring these mutations also have important implications in vaccine development should a scenario arise wherein recent avian or swine H2 viruses are able to gain a foothold in the human population.
For years, Richards herself had straddled these worlds of clear logic and messy human relationships, but in Berlin her footholds crumble.
That shift, along with a vacuum created by a decline in traditional organized crime networks, allowed transnational gangs to gain a foothold in the narcotics trade and human trafficking, Mr. Riordan said.
One obvious problem is present from the start: since society, the alleged agent of corruption, is composed entirely of naturally good human beings, how can evil ever get a foothold?
"While pioneer modern humans were staking tenuous footholds" in the region, the last Neandertals "were hanging on," Finlayson says.
