Word: braziller
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...innovation. After all, the prophet is a visionary and given to sudden revelations. In 1978 president Spencer Kimball had one such revelation, and blacks were finally allowed to become priests of the church. It was a practical vision. Proselytizing had been proceeding apace in Latin America, where -- particularly in Brazil -- many new converts had African ancestors. The only groups more successful than the Mormons in Latin America are the Pentecostal and other Evangelical preachers. Kimball's revelation also gave the church another continent to conquer: Africa, which recorded membership of 79,000, a 16% growth since 1990, the highest...
...baby. But when his mother, Luciene das Dores, unwraps the snug cover, the sight is shocking: Rafael has no arms or legs. "I got very upset and started to cry when I first saw him," says Das Dores, 23, a part-time cleaning woman who lives in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. "When I saw him with only a head and a torso, I was devastated. I wanted to kill myself." She could not help feeling guilty: unaware that she might hurt her baby, she had taken the powerful sedative thalidomide during her pregnancy...
...patients don't know about thalidomide's dark side -- and when those selling and dispensing the drug don't give adequate warning. Although the U.S. has strict rules governing thalidomide's use, controls are much laxer in some other parts of the world. The consequences are now apparent in Brazil, which has at least 46 new instances of birth defects caused by thalidomide. If there are cases in other countries, they haven't received the same publicity, but given the increasing use of the drug, health officials fear that the problem will be widespread...
...Brazil is one of the largest producers of thalidomide because it is home to perhaps 300,000 people who suffer from leprosy. About 30,000 of them take the drug to soothe the excruciating pain and eradicate the lesions that occur in severe cases of the infection. The only alternative treatment, corticosteroids, does not work as quickly or as completely. "The pain was so great that I couldn't walk," says Irani, 24, a former patient at the Santa Isabel leper colony. "I almost died. Thalidomide was my salvation...
Greed also comes into play. Although only two companies are authorized to produce the drug in Brazil, several underground laboratories reportedly sell it to people without a prescription. Health authorities shut down one illicit operation last year, after a TV-news crew showed how easy it was to buy the pills...