Word: corde
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Keone's dream seems about to come true, thanks to a pioneering medical treatment. Exactly a year ago last week, Keone, now 13, became the first sickle-cell patient to receive a transplant of blood cells from the umbilical cord of a newborn infant. In effect, he got a new bloodmaking system. Other young sickle-cell patients have undergone transplants, but these involved bone-marrow cells and had to be matched precisely with the recipients' own blood. In Keone's case, though, his half-sister could not offer matching marrow. So his doctors decided to turn to more easily available...
...Cord-cell transplants have been performed for other blood diseases, such as leukemia, but they remain experimental and highly risky. Dr. Andrew Yeager, a transplant physician at Emory University medical school in Atlanta, warned the Penns that not only might Keone die, but there was not even more than a 50% chance the procedure would do any good. After seven years of blood transfusions that were becoming more and more painful and increasingly ineffective, Keone decided he had no other choice. "Mama, I might die anyway," he told his mother Leslie, a medical technician, who left the decision entirely...
Last week, on the first anniversary of the transplant, Yeager finally felt justified medically in pronouncing Keone cured. "The cord blood cells are now fully operational, making all healthy blood cells in Keone," he says. Equally important, there was no sign of sickle cells and no need for more transfusions. That, of course, was a coup for the doctors, who believe their widely watched experiment could benefit other severely ill sickle-cell kids who can't find matching donors for conventional transplants. Indeed, Yeager believes using umbilical cells could increase the number of successful transplants...
John H. Turco, director of Dartmouth College Heath Services, said bacterial meningitis actually exists in two common forms. Meningococcal meningitis causes inflammation of tissue surrounding the spinal cord and brain. The other form, meningococcemia, occurs when the meningococcal bacteria gets into the bloodstream. Turco said that this second form is more deadly...
Those who contract the disease initially experience flu-like symptoms. The disease progresses extremely rapidly, though, and life-threatening symptoms--such as inflammation of the brain and the spinal cord--can appear within a matter of hours...