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Dr. Shirley Fannin on: No Time To Sit Around
Dr. Shirley Fannin Listen in Real Audio

This wasn't time to sit around and ponder and meet with your colleagues and discuss things and get some sense of shared information. This was happening too fast. Influenza has a short incubation period, meaning that you can be exposed today and dead tomorrow because an incubation period is one to three days and this appeared that some people even had a shorter incubation period. So, there wasn't any time to do the usual, go through the usual thought processes or planning or support group development, all those things, the things you do to solve mysteries or to make yourself think you're solving mysteries. So, I just see it as very chaotic, because it was so rapid and so dramatic and the drama part is how some people, obviously, not everybody, but some people died very severe respiratory deaths because they had hemorrhagic pneumonias; and I've heard people say, "Oh, well, it was just bacterial pneumonias that complicated influenza" -- no, it was not. And I have a feeling that the hemorrhagic pneumonia that was caused by this strain of influenza was probably one its virulence factors and one of the things that made it so awful to deal with.

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