In 1972, a colleague, Dr. Albert Z. Kapikian, used a technique known as immune electron microscopy to discover what caused outbreaks of a condition called explosive diarrhea, often occurring on cruise ships.
Sure, Defra hasn't had it easy of late, what with outbreaks of foot-and-mouth, foot in mouth, bluetongue and flooding, but still, to take out one of the few agencies with experience of promoting our food abroad seems petty and shortsighted even by its standards.
There is no evidence it can be spread by an asymptomatic patient, but it can however still be transmitted after a patient has died, which is often what perpetuates outbreaks because funeral rites involving touching and kissing the deceased are common in West Africa.
Next, Turner plans to look at animal movement patterns and weather to understand what triggers outbreaks on a wider geographic and ecological level.
That's what makes outbreaks like avian flu so scary – they may not be as fatal or dramatic as some diseases, but they can infect vast numbers of people very quickly, and a few percent of a very big number is still a very big number.
Particularly, it is unclear to what extent outbreaks of resistance can be ascribed to horizontal gene transfer relative to other possible mechanisms of resistance spread.
Governments reckon the worst of those effects are yet to be felt, but they are still busy trying to calculate what the outbreak is going to cost them.
It's almost impossible for a modern American to imagine what an outbreak of rinderpest, a viral cattle disease, would have looked like.
But what this outbreak is also making clear is the extent to which illegality and dodges to beat the taxman pervade livestock farming in the British Isles.The missing 60 sheep have spotlighted the smuggling of sheep from Ulster into the Republic.
