Word: asthma
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DIED. CLAIR PATTERSON, 73, geochemist who in the early '50s established the age of the earth and the solar system as 4.6 billion years; of asthma; in Sea Ranch, California...
...York City agencies that were repeatedly informed of her peril. But while the murder of Elisa by her mother is appalling, it is hardly unexpected. In the death zones of America's postmodern ghetto, stripped of jobs and human services and sanitation, plagued by AIDS, tuberculosis, pediatric asthma and endemic clinical depression, largely abandoned by American physicians and devoid of the psychiatric services familiar in most middle-class communities, deaths like these are part of a predictable scenario...
...Asthma is an inflammation of the bronchial tubes that is not difficult to treat, even if doctors cannot cure it. (Most people with asthma develop it as children or teenagers, and some eventually outgrow the condition.) The key, specialists say, is to control the underlying inflammation, usually with corticosteroid drugs. What makes the disease so dangerous is that it can kill in a matter of minutes. Every now and again, for reasons that are not entirely clear, the bronchioles overreact to the presence of allergens. The walls of the airways clamp down, shutting off the supply of oxygen...
...what happened to Krissy Taylor. The attack occurred so quickly, in the middle of the night, that Taylor did not even have time to call out to her family. But while the autopsy report says how Taylor died, it does not explain why she was not diagnosed with asthma in the first place. Friends say that for at least a year before her death, she would occasionally complain of being short of breath. Taylor had seen her family physician as recently as May, but he had treated her for what he apparently believed was a severe sore throat and bronchitis...
This is not unusual. Asthma is known to scientists as a great masquerader. According to doctors at the pediatric-care unit of the University of Florida Health Sciences Center in Gainesville, 25% of the patients referred to them had been previously misdiagnosed with pneumonia or bronchitis. One reason: primary-care physicians may not suspect asthma if they do not actually hear wheezing, which is more likely to occur at night than in a doctor's office. In many cases the symptoms are so subtle that they are dismissed as allergies...