Word: cdc
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...first CDC experts suspected an attack of swine flu, which health officials had been fearing that year. But the evidence did not support that hypothesis. Some who had merely walked past the hotel contracted the disease. Yet it was noncontagious: no one caught it from the original 182 victims, 29 of whom died. Nor were any bacteria found. "The picture slowly evolved that we didn't know what we were dealing with," Tsai remembers...
...outbreak vanished as quickly as it began, but researchers at CDC, including Microbiologist Joseph McCade, 43, continued to examine the specimens taken from the victims. Five months after the convention, he took another look at some red sausage-shaped bacteria and concluded that they were the culprits. They had festered in the water of the hotel's cooling tower and had been carried through the air as the water evaporated. The antibiotic Erythromycin proved effective in treating the disease, and many similar cooling towers across the country are now chlorinated to guard against another outbreak...
...famed mystery was solved primarily by the epidemiologists rather than the lab scientists. In January 1980, doctors in Wisconsin and Minnesota noticed that an unusual number of young women were suddenly developing high temperatures and low blood pressure, with potentially fatal results; out of the 55 patients in the CDC's initial study, seven had died by the end of May. Dr. Kathryn Shands of EIS led the CDC investigation, developing a clear definition for what soon became known as toxic shock syndrome and recording in detail all the cases...
...blemishes on the CDC's record involves an epidemic that never happened. In 1976, swine flu broke out at Fort Dix, N.J., killing one soldier. Health officials worried about the similarity of the virus to one that had caused the deadly 1918 influenza pandemic that killed more than 500,000 Americans. At President Gerald Ford's urging, a $100 million program was rushed into being to immunize people across the country. Not only did no epidemic break out, but 100 or so people came down with a syndrome, apparently connected to the vaccines, that caused partial paralysis. Ninety million unused...
...officials that he had five patients, all of them active homosexuals, who were suffering from an unusual and deadly form of pneumonia, pneumocystis carinii. More alarming still, their immune systems seemed to have broken down. Gottlieb and an EIS agent based in Los Angeles reported the grim news in CDC's weekly publication. Almost simultaneously, Dr. Alvin Friedman-Kien of New York University noted that several of his homosexual patients had the same weakened immune systems and were suffering from Kaposi's sarcoma, a rare cancer of the skin usually seen only in older men. Later that summer Dr. Harold...