Word: azar
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...disease Jill Seaman battled is not new. In the 19th century, kala-azar ravaged much of eastern India, where it earned its name--Hindi for "black sickness." In 1900 a British physician, Dr. William Boog Leishman, developed a stain to detect the parasite with a microscope, and Dr. Charles Donovan demonstrated that specimens could be extracted from the spleen. In their honor, the deadly parasite is called Leishmania donovani. Variants of kala-azar are found in southern Europe and South America. A complex treatment involving daily injections of a potentially toxic, antimony-based compound (as in the drug Pentostam...
...Medecins Sans Frontieres refused to go along. In the summer of 1988, with a team already in Khartoum, MSF clandestinely sent a second one into the south. The team soon began to hear reports of a strange new "killing disease," which its doctors in Khartoum believed to be kala-azar...
...Four years earlier, she had taken a break from her job in Alaska to work with Ethiopian refugees at a camp in Sudan but came to realize that she needed more training in tropical medicine. When MSF was scouting at the school for a doctor to take on kala-azar in Sudan, she signed up immediately...
Before MSF hired her, there had been a debate within the organization about whether a kala-azar epidemic of such massive size could be handled with no hospitals in the area. "We were going to be dealing with thousands of patients at a time, and we didn't know if it would be possible to do this out in the open and under a tree," says Johan Hesselink, who headed MSF-Holland's southern Sudan operations during that period...
...tiny insect, which cannot fly very high or far, inhabits the vast, red acacia forests, where it bites its victims in order to get protein-rich blood to develop its eggs. When female sand flies bit people driven by war or famine into the forests from areas where kala-azar was already endemic, the flies picked up the disease themselves, ready to be passed...