Word: breast
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...diseases to which women are susceptible, few are more devastating than breast cancer. This year alone the disease will affect 70,000 American women and kill 30,000. Doctors who have tried for decades to determine the cause now have strong evidence that a principal villain is a virus. Researchers in the U.S. and India have found high concentrations of virus-like particles in the milk of women with family histories of breast cancer. Equally important, according to an article published in the British scientific journal Nature, they have found that these particles are indistinguishable from viruses known to cause...
...findings represent a major medical discovery. They raise the possibility that doctors might one day be able to immunize women against breast cancer. Doctors have known since 1936 that the Bittner virus can cause cancer in laboratory mice; they learned in 1969 that similar particles could also be found in human milk. It was not until early this year that a direct correlation between the virus-like particles and a familial history of human breast cancer was established...
...provided the clue was a study by Bombay Drs. S.M. Sirsat, J.C. Paymaster and A.B. Vaidya of the Parsis, descendants of the Zoroastrians who fled Persia 1,200 years ago, settled in India and married exclusively within their own sect. Parsi women are three times more likely to develop breast cancers than the rest of the Indian population. Nearly 40% of the Parsi mothers studied showed virus-like particles in their milk...
...hardly unique to the Parsis. In a study undertaken to test the relevance of the Indian team's findings, Biophysicist Dan Moore and his colleagues at the Institute for Medical Research in Camden, N.J., analyzed milk from 166 American women. Of 156 with no family history of breast cancer, only seven (5%) showed evidence of the particles in their milk. But of ten women whose families had a history of the disease, six (60%) were found to harbor large numbers of the particles. Doctors are still reluctant to state flatly that these particles actually cause breast cancers in humans...
Welsh-born Sarah Thomas is a middle-aged widow working in Cambridge, England. Threatened by breast cancer, she seeks a "last" holiday in Ulster with two close Catholic friends, Caroline and Colum Moore, and a former lover, a Protestant left-wing journalist named James McNeil...