Word: antitoxine
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Given its centrality to Alaskan life, mushing emerged early on as both a popular sport and a vital necessity. In the winter of 1925, an epidemic of diphtheria ravaged Nome, which lacked the medicine to combat it. The nearest supply of antitoxin serum was in Anchorage-nearly 700 frozen miles away. In what has become known as the "Great Race of Mercy," 20 mushers and some 150 dogs teamed up to deliver the drugs in under six days, quelling an epidemic that threatened to decimate the town. Balto, the lead dog on the final stretch of the relay, earned national...
...lift a finger to fix health care or highways could suddenly find $700 billion for No Banker Left Behind? And so this time, people made themselves heard: they passed petitions, lit up the phone lines, melted the message boards. In an age of poisonous partisanship, it was like an antitoxin, the country drawn together, red and blue, young and old, in disgust at elected Representatives who had failed to foresee or forestall a man-made, slow-motion catastrophe...
This suggested, says Walker, that doctors must find better ways to drain lymph from around the organs, in order to relieve the pressure. And they need to develop an antitoxin, since even when antibiotics kill off the bacteria, the poison that the bug has emitted can still kill the patient. There is also an anthrax vaccine, made exclusively for the U.S. government by a private manufacturer named BioPort in Lansing, Mich. But in 1999 the FDA asked the company to stop shipment of its vaccine until BioPort instituted better quality-control measures. The company expects to begin shipping vaccines again...
AVAILABILITY: Hospitals and ambulances have atropine; the Centers for Disease Control stocks botulism antitoxin. Ordinary folks can't buy either...
...THEY WORK? Atropine effects of nerve gases. Full recovery is possible if treatment is immediate. But atropine can cause serious side effects if you have not been exposed to a nerve agent. Botulism antitoxin halts, but does not reverse, the paralytic effects...