Word: cholera
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...Discovery of the microbe that causes a disease is not necessarily the most important factor in halting its ravages. Dr. John Snow checked a cholera outbreak in London in 1854 merely by having the handle removed from the Broad Street pump that was gushing contaminated water. Then the cholera vibrio was found, but volunteers have guzzled billions of them without getting sick-and now the disease, if it develops, can be treated simply by replacing body fluids, without serums or antimicrobial drugs...
...shortly after the International Organization of Standardization was formed, doctors discovered that an order of Swedish hypodermic needles rushed to epidemic-stricken Egypt did not fit U.S. syringes in use there. Needles to fit eventually arrived-but not until hundreds of victims had died of cholera. Since then, the organization, working through scores of national standards groups, has approved 58 worldwide standards for everything from musical pitch to the abrasion resistance of rubber...
...looking for the dwarf crabs of the rice fields, [and] they were always followed by packs of stray dogs, whose . . . main nourishment was their excrement . . . They died in such numbers that they were no longer mourned . . . They simply returned to the earth like wild mangoes falling. They died of cholera . . . Some drowned in the river. Others died of sunstroke or were blinded by the sun. Others were filled with the same worms that devoured the stray dogs and died, suffocated...
...people of Calcutta know that before the reviving monsoon rains arrive some time in June, the infection will sweep through their steaming and fetid streets, sometimes killing as many as half of those it touches. Even for a city stamped by the World Health Organization as the "worst cholera epidemic area in the world," this year's outbreak has been especially bad. At one point the Nilratan Sarkar hospital, which specializes in treating the disease, was admitting a new patient every four minutes, the highest admission rate the hospital has known in 20 years...
...tourist sights ("I wept as I sat on that bench and looked at the Taj Mahal"), Author Wylie is dazzling the natives with his knowledge of Shinto, his deft handling of chopsticks, his keen analytic mind. Everywhere Wylie trails disasters-Hong Kong was harassed by bubonic plague, Calcutta by cholera, "just after we left"-confounding Communists with his arguments, straightening out the thinking of Asian leaders and U.S. officials. Wylie's heart is obviously in the right place even when his head...