Word: bone-marrow
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Using bioengineering techniques, medical researchers have begun to mass- produce these substances and use them, sometimes in combined "cocktails," to boost the immune system against specific diseases. In clinical trials at Boston's New England Deaconess Hospital, Dr. Jerome Groopman has found that granulocyte-macrophage colony-stimulating factor reverses bone-marrow failure and boosts white-cell counts in AIDS patients. Gamma interferon seems to remedy the defective functioning of monocytes and macrophages in a wide variety of diseases. Alpha interferon has been particularly effective against two types of leukemia and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, a cancer of the lymph system...
...which both B cells and T cells are lacking. The most famous SCID victim, a Texas boy named David, lived for twelve years in a germ-free bubble while doctors searched in vain for a cure for his disease. He died in 1984, four months after receiving a bone-marrow transplant that doctors hoped would supply his missing immune cells...
Michael Bungo, director of the Space Biomedical Research Institute at Houston's Johnson Space Center, is not so sure. "This is just one test case," he says. "The margin of error is considerable." The validity of the 5% figure, Bungo believes, also depends on whether bone-marrow testing was done at the preferred point -- the spine -- or at the heel bone, which he says the Soviets have done in the past. Besides, while total calcium loss may have been low, he is concerned that there still may be structural changes in Romanenko's bones that could make them more prone...
...patients' radiation- ravaged bone marrow could not produce sufficient immune cells to fight off ever present bacteria. Doctors battled soaring fevers, infection and internal bleeding with sophisticated antibiotics and clotting agents. At Chernobyl, Gale and Selidovkin had tried to save severely affected technicians and fire fighters with bone-marrow transplants. The medical team in Rio decided against that surgical tactic, in part because the patients' bone marrow had not been irreversibly destroyed and because, from the nature of their exposure, some of the sickest patients had become radioactive...
...Goiania victims in most serious condition, including Leide, were flown to a naval hospital in Rio de Janeiro. There they are being treated by a core team of eight radiation specialists, including one from the U.S. and another from the Soviet Union. Bone-marrow transplants, which were conducted on Chernobyl survivors, are not being considered. Radiation can destroy the vital marrow, which produces among other things the white blood cells that help the body guard against infection, but some of the Goiania victims are so radioactive that new bone marrow would simply become contaminated. All patients are undergoing frequent decontamination...