Germ warfare: Hong Kong’s never-ending fight against viruses
Since the fatal outbreak of Sars in 2003, Hong Kong has been battling to keep a succession of diseases at bay. Sarah Lazarus examines the readiness of the city’s defences against ever-evolving strains of viruses
On February 21, 2003, Liu Jianlun, a doctor from Guangdong province, travelled to Hong Kong and checked into Kowloon’s Metropole Hotel. He was feeling under the weather. Eleven days later he died in hospital. Severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars) had arrived in Hong Kong.
Sars created shock waves because it was so deadly and because it brought a chilling fact into sharp focus – that nature is constantly producing new diseases and no one is safe from them. Presently, two viruses are sounding alarm bells among infectious disease experts.
One is a new strain of bird flu, H7N9, the other is Middle East respiratory syndrome (Mers), a close relative of the Sars virus.
“If we look at the numbers from earlier this year, we can see that H7N9 spread at unprecedented speed,” says Professor Malik Peiris, chair of virology at the University of Hong Kong. As the scientist who discovered the Sars virus, he knows only too well what havoc a new virus can wreak.
As for Mers, says Peiris: “If it mutates to become more virulent, the outlook isn’t good.”
THE HUMAN RACE HAS been plagued by infectious diseases since nomadic people first came together to form settled farming communities, around 10,000 years ago. Viruses and bacteria took advantage of the large number of people and animals living together. They multiplied and prospered and there has been an arms race between them and us ever since. Every time human ingenuity finds a way to stamp out the germs, they evolve a new strategy to outfox us.