From Tokyo there were frozen specimens of the current bird flu virus, as well as quite separate – and unexpected – samples of SARS from the masked palm civet cat, the wild animal species considered a culinary delicacy in China, and suspected of being the source of a renewed but so far limited outbreak of the disease that became an epidemic in the Far East in 2003. There were also cultures from two human victims of the new SARS outbreak in China’s Guangzhou city. The inconclusive research notes on both from Dubette’s Japanese subsidiary ran to forty pages and included warnings from the World Health Organization of a potential pandemic from both respiratory illnesses. ‘We didn’t know we were getting the additional severe acute respiratory syndrome material?’ queried Parnell. Ted Lapidus shook his head. ‘Maybe Tokyo is treating them as allied conditions to examine in conjunction.’ Parnell said: ‘And if the viral composition is different, we could confuse ourselves.’ ‘It could be something Russell Benn and his merry men want to work on at the same time,’ suggested Beverley Jackson.
