Word: aunt
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...Georgia, a few months later, when the married daughter of one of the victims discovered that she too had the malignancy, the family could not avoid what had earlier seemed an illogical, incredible conclusion: four of them had "caught" cancer from a 63-year-old South African aunt who in 1982 had crisscrossed the U.S., visiting her late husband's relatives...
Family members, who have requested anonymity, recalled that the aunt had suffered from a severe sore throat during her tour and wondered if she had somehow passed along an infection that caused cancer. Poring over medical books in local libraries, they found no reference to a viral cause of non- Hodgkin's lymphoma. Instead, they came upon another cancer of immune-system cells, Burkitt's lymphoma, which afflicts black African children and is strongly associated with infection by the Epstein-Barr virus. Even though the stricken family is white, says the Georgia victim, "it was the only viral- caused cancer...
Confronting their doctors, the victims asked if they might have Burkitt's lymphoma, caught from their visiting aunt. A typical reaction, says the Georgian, was " 'Don't you ever say anything like that. If you came into my office and said that cancer is contagious, it would empty out.' " In desperation, a family member called Dr. Seymour Grufferman, a cancer epidemiologist at Duke University Medical Center, explained the contagion idea and sent him biopsy slides of the victims' tumors...
...researchers found that the aunt had become ill just before she left Africa and that blood samples from four of the twelve Americans she visited showed signs of recent Epstein-Barr virus infection. Genetic causes were ruled out because not all the victims were blood relations. Says Grufferman: "This is one of the best-documented cancer clusters worldwide, but it's difficult to investigate...
...letters home. Some of them never got there: to be exact, 235 letters to 117 addresses in 34 states from 93 servicemen. For reasons that may never be known, this batch of V-mail wound up in an attic in Raleigh, N.C., in the house of an aunt of a serviceman. Mixed in with some old socks in an Army duffel bag, they were discovered in June by Michael Minguez, an exterminator, and turned over to Raleigh Postmaster Ross Garulski. Last week during a ceremony at the Washington headquarters of the Postal Service, Postmaster General Albert Casey, himself a World...