The species barrier they face may fully explain the difference in performance compared with children.
That animal diseases jump the species barrier from time to time is well understood.
The flu has a nasty habit of jumping the species barrier, hopping to humans from both pigs and chickens.
In 1997, after bird flu first jumped the species barrier, Hong Kong was the first city to be badly affected.
Thus it may be the key which explains how prions are able to jump so effectively across the species barrier.
Some of these viruses have also been reported to cross the species barrier and cause disease or sub-clinical infections in humans.
But the new version of the mouse strain was able to overcome the species barrier and could convert the hamster proteins.
This, some scientists believe, leads to new illnesses formed by genetic mutation crossing the species barrier and entering the human population.
This, some scientists believe, leads to new diseases formed by genetic mutation crossing the species barrier and entering the human population.
One group of researchers has thus decided to cross the species barrier and test its models on another highly social mammal, the dolphin.
Although few pathogens can survive in both an animal and a human host, there is laboratory evidence that resistance can be passed across the species barrier through meat products.
No one now knows how easy it would be to turbo-charge an existing human pathogen, or take one that infects another type of animal and assist its passage over the species barrier.
Mr Schwartz is a former director of the Institut Pasteur in France, and his book maps out with great clarity the scientific investigation into how scrapie a disease that has long been known to afflict sheep came to cross the species barrier to cows, and then from cows to humans.
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