Cold comfort

摘要

In April last year, Paige Villers was finishing basic training at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas when she came down with a cold. She struggled to shake it off. Then came a prolonged battle with pneumonia, followed by an immune over-reaction that killed her.rn"She had symptoms that just looked like a cold or the flu," Villers's mother told reporters. "You hear of people dying of pneumonia, but it's usually older people. Not a 19-year-old in the prime of her life."rnIt turned out that Villers had been infected by an adenovirus, a family of viruses that normally causes no more than a common cold. But this virus was a nasty new strain called Ad14, which killed at least 140 people in the US in 2007.