Dick Thompson
Dick Thompson
Richard KnightThompson, Jr.was an American racecar driver. A Washington, D.C. dentist by trade, he is known as "The Flying Dentist". He won numerous Sports Car Club of Americachampionships and was inducted in the Corvette Hall of Fame. Thompson brought credibility to the Corvette as a world-class sports car. Active from the late 1950s until the 1970s, Thompson raced for several notable racers, including the factory Corvette team for John Fitch and Briggs Cunningham...
ProfessionRace Car Driver
Date of Birth9 July 1920
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Bird flu is a disease among animals; it's very difficult for this virus to move from poultry into humans. Our concern is that it will change in a way that will allow it to easily move between humans, and that will trigger a pandemic.
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We can confirm that the 15-year-old girl was infected with the H5N1 avian flu virus as a result of the London testing.
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But the risk is pretty much the same as it has been, it is very low to humans, but we're worried about the transformation of the virus into a human pandemic strain.
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What this virus can't do now is move easily from person to person. We worry that it could develop this characteristic of human-to-human transmission.
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There is really no time frame. As long as the virus is circulating it could jump into humans.
laboratory reference viruses
Those viruses are in a WHO reference laboratory and are being studied.
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It was not unexpected. There will be sporadic human cases as long as the virus is circulating in animals.
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It was not unexpected, ... There will be sporadic human cases as long as the virus is circulating in animals.
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We know we're overdue for an influenza pandemic strain, and we know it will occur, but we don't know when or even exactly what virus will cause it. It is possible that the virus won't be H5N1 at all or that this virus will change in a way so that the vaccine under development doesn't work against it.
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We are concerned that the virus infects a human that already has contracted a strain of normal influenza and this influenza will mix with this avian form. As a result, a new strain could be formed that the human immune system has never seen before and that would ignite a pandemic.
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When the virus shows up in a new country, it doesn't mean that the pandemic has started, it means that the animal disease has spread.
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We believe and are very concerned that this virus -- which is now widely circulating in the environment and moving west -- has the potential to ignite a pandemic.
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This is a virus that isn't acting in a predictable way. It's unusual that cats would be infected at all. The range of hosts here is unusual for an avian virus.
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There are a lot of scary stories out there about the next pandemic, but we have to make difficult decisions without a lot of information. The real answer is we don't know until the next pandemic virus appears.