Word: coughing
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While Akira Kurosawa was waiting around for international moneymen to cough up the money for his ultimate production--an adaptation of Shakespeare's King Lear--he sketched and painted scenes, a practice called "storyboarding." Though Kurosawa's eyesight is failing, he still managed to create dramatically posed illustrations that assault the eyes like a rabid ronin...
...recalled Ephrem Ngong Kum, 24, of Su-Bum, a village some 200 miles northwest of Yaounde, Cameroon's capital. "They died in the houses, in streets, outside the forest, in the stream." Fellow Villager Chia David Wambong remembered a warm feeling, as if he were drunk. "Everyone started to cough, and some people vomited blood," he said. "I saw people on the ground screaming. Everyone was crying." When the cloud lifted, there were few survivors to mourn the dead...
...Whooping cough, named for the distinctive sound made by its victims as they gasp for air between bouts of violent coughing, was until the 1940s a major killer of children. Caused by a bacterial infection that increases the amount of mucus in the lungs, the disease sometimes results in convulsions and death. Over the past four decades, however, pertussis has been largely subdued in developed nations by mass inoculations with a vaccine made from killed pertussis bacteria. Now doctors annually pump some 18 million doses of the vaccine into U.S. children--usually in the form of a D.P.T. shot...
Despite these efforts, the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta reports that the incidence of whooping cough is increasing; the latest figures show that the number of U.S. cases has nearly doubled in the past three years, from 1,895 in 1982 to 3,275 in 1985. Meanwhile, health officials are concerned that more and more parents, aware of cases like Traci's, will refuse to allow their youngsters to be inoculated...
...these severe complications--which can include convulsions, shock, loss of muscle control and fever--are caused by bacterial toxins. Still, most doctors insist that the shots are worth the risks. Martin Smith, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, calculates that the chances of suffering serious damage from whooping cough are ten times greater than having damaging side effects from the vaccine. Says Dr. Peter Patriarca of the CDC's immunization division: "There is no question that the vaccine has more side effects than any other vaccine. But it's a matter of risk vs. benefits...