PART ONE : READING COMPREHENSION
Soal no 151 s.d 155 mengacu kepada bacaan berikut.
As with so much of this new disease, 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 - oid flight attendant who imported the disease from Hongkong. In that city, the two major outbreaks - in the Prince of Wales Hospitai 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, ministerof State at Singapore’s Ministry of Health, “But we have drawn the conclusion that some people whiie others spread it to a lot.” Worried health officiais know that each of Asia’s supercities is a single seperspreaders away from another outbreak.
That means identifying potential superspreaders is vital to halting SARS except that scientist don’t know what makes a superspreader 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 suffers barely show symtoms while others become mortaily ill-or within the viruses themselves. Even thought doctors are now almost certain that the novel coronavirus first discovered by the University of Hong Kong (HKU) is the primary cause of SARS, the total number of isolated coronaviruses in patients is quite still low. “So it’s difficultto compare intermsofgenomicarrangementwhether those with a high transmissibility actually have some changes in genetic material,” says Dr. K. Y. Yuen, a microbiologist at HKU.
(Bryan Walsh. What Makes A Superspreaders? Hong Kong, 2003)
According to the text, superspreader is....