alienation news

Epidemic kills scientist who helped discover it

Carlo Urbani, the scientist who discovered the first clue that a dangerous new microbe was beginning to spread around the globe, succumbed yesterday in a Bangkok hospital bed to the frightening disease he alerted the world to.
It was Urbani, an Italian epidemiologist at the World Health Organization's office in Hanoi, who first responded last month when anxious hospital officials phoned to report that a sick U.S. businessman was infecting doctors and nurses with a strange pneumonia. Within days, Urbani himself fell ill.
"Carlo was the one who very quickly saw that this was something very strange. When people became very concerned in the hospital, he was there every day," said Pascale Brudon, the WHO representative in Hanoi. "We are all devastated."
The disease is the first dangerous new infection that spreads directly from one person to another to emerge in decades.
By the time the sick Chinese American businessman, Johnny Cheng, made it to the French Hospital in Hanoi on Feb. 26, he was already deathly ill. It looked like pneumonia, but Cheng's high fever, cough and other symptoms worried doctors. Cheng had just flown in from Hong Kong, where a father and son had recently died from the "bird flu," a deadly bug that experts long feared might spark a pandemic rivaling the Spanish flu of 1918-19, which killed as many as 50 million people.
Urbani called his regional supervisor in Manila.
"He was reporting a probable case of bird flu," said WHO spokesman Dick Thompson, who happened to be where the phone rang on March 5. He was sitting at the desk of a colleague who had been dispatched to Beijing to persuade officials to be less secretive about a mysterious outbreak in Guangdong province in southern China. Since early February, WHO had been hearing reports that hundreds of people were getting sick with what sounded like a strange form of pneumonia. Officials worried that it, too, might be bird flu.
Unbeknownst to health authorities at the time, Cheng, 48, had traveled in Guangdong and is believed to have stayed at the Metropole Hotel in Hong Kong during the same time as a 64-year-old Chinese professor who had been treating patients in Guangdong. The professor, in Hong Kong for a wedding, had checked into Room 911.