Word: cdc
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...mosquitoes, which carry such diseases as malaria and yellow fever, also transport the deadly AIDS virus? The question arose in 1985, when the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta studied an unusually dense clustering of AIDS sufferers in the mosquito-infested area of Belle Glade, Fla. Last week the Atlanta Constitution stirred up the mosquito scare anew by publishing the preliminary findings of a research team sponsored by the National Institutes of Health. Its tentative conclusion: the AIDS virus can indeed ride as a passenger on the blood-sucking mosquito...
Medical researchers remain puzzled by the syndrome. Says Epidemiologist Jonathan Kaplan of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta, who investigated the 1985 Lake Tahoe outbreak: "We don't know what causes it, and we have a hard time diagnosing it." Still, notes Stephen Straus, a virologist at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), who has interviewed sufferers, "you have to start believing what they're describing...
...Boston patients studied by Komaroff's team, 21% claimed to have suffered extreme exhaustion for at least six months. None had pre-existing organic illnesses that could account for their symptoms. The second J.A.M.A. paper, by Kaplan's CDC team, revealed that only 15 of 134 patients studied in the Lake Tahoe outbreak had "severe, persistent fatigue" of undetermined cause. The remainder either had symptoms that quickly disappeared, missed little or no work because of illness, or had other conditions that could have brought on fatigue...
While heterosexual transmission is possible, it does not happen easily. In a CDC study of spouses of AIDS patients who were infected by contaminated blood transfusions, researchers found that wives became infected 16% of the time and husbands only 5%. Some 10% of the people studied had more than 200 sexual contacts with an infected partner and still did not pick up the virus...
Only 4% of all AIDS cases are classified as instances of heterosexual transmission. Nearly half of those cases actually have no identified risks of infection, but the victims were born in countries where heterosexual transmission is believed to play a major role. The CDC lists an additional 3% of AIDS cases as "undetermined" in origin. Most of these victims were people who died before being thoroughly interviewed. Says the researcher who investigates this category: "We still get a flavor that they are engaging in high-risk behavior...