Thursday, January 26, 2006

Where's George?


Where's George? Why, follow the money, of course. But before that, this. . .
The Hong Kong SARS epidemic in 2003 began with a doctor from Guangzhou who came to Hong Kong to seek medical treatment.
On his way to a local hospital, the sick physician infected a dozen or so other people, while waiting at a lift lobby on the ninth floor of a Kowloon hotel. With the medical man's arrival at the local hospital, the infection was then transmitted to other medical staff.
The infection rapidly spread, cluster-like, in and around hospitals and -- mysteriously at the time -- among many residents at Amoy Gardens housing estate.
Meanwhile, two of the people from the hotel lift lobby had boarded aeroplanes: one flew to Toronto, the other to Singapore. Infection clusters promptly developed in those two metropolitans areas.
So it goes.
I don't know if the researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organisation in Göttingen, Germany, are aware of any of that, but they have come up with a good whizz --
George Washington gives clue how flu pandemic could spread: physorg
Where's George? Follow the money: bill tracking report
Chicago blues: Dead Presidents, by Little Walter

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