Soal dan Pembahasan TBI (Reading Comprehension) Bagian 34

        As with so much of this new desease, scientists  still  don’t  know  much  why  SARS seems to spread at varying rates in different areas,  but  this  might  be  the  result  of  the influence of so – called superspreaders, infected individuals who appear to be much more contagious than the average SARS patient. Almost 100 SARS cases in Singapore can be traced to a 26 – year – old flight attendant who imported  the  deseasefrom Hing  Kong.  Intahat city, the two major outbreaks – in the prince of Wales Hospital and the Amoy Gardens housing estate – were almost certainly triggered by a pair of superspreaders. “We don’t know how SARS spread”, says Dr. Balaji Sadasivan, Minister of State at Singapore’s Ministry of Health, “but we have drawn the conclusion that wsome people don’t seem to spread it to many people while others spread it to a lot”. Worried health officials know that each of Asia’s supercities is a single superspreaders away from another outbreak.

        That means identifying ptential superspreaders is vital to halting SARS – except that scientists don’t know what makes a superspreaders  super.  “That’s  the  $  64,000 question”, says  Dr,  Osman David Mansoor, a WHO scientist. “It’s probably a spectrum of biological variation”. That means genetic aberrations within patients – which could help explain why some SARS sufferers barely show symptoms while others become mortally ill - or within the viruses themselves. Even though doctors are now almost certain that the novel coronavirus first discovered by the Universityof Hong Kong (HKU) is the primary cause of SARS, the total number of isolatedcoronaviruses in patients is quite still low. “So it’s difficult to compare  in   terms   of   genomic   arrangement whether those with a high transmissibility actually have some change in genetic material”, says Dr. K. Y. Yuen, a microbiologist at HKU.

(Bryan Walsh. What Makes Superspreader? Hong Kong, 2003)