Word: coughs
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...happens to every medical student sooner or later. You get a cough that persists for a while or feel a funny pain in the stomach or notice a tiny lump under the skin. Ordinarily, you would just ignore it--but now, armed with your rapidly growing store of medical knowledge, you can't help worrying. The cough could mean just a cold, but it could also be a sign of lung cancer. A twinge might be internal bleeding. The lump is probably a lymph node--but is it bigger than it should be? Could it be Hodgkin's disease...
...dinner party. But for the tens of thousands who suffer from true hypochondria, it's no joke. Hypochondriacs live in constant terror that they are dying of some awful disease, or even several awful diseases at once. Doctors can assure them that there's nothing wrong, but since the cough or the pain is real, the assurances fall on deaf ears. And because no physician or test can offer a 100% guarantee that one doesn't have cancer or multiple sclerosis or an ulcer, a hypochondriac always has fuel to feed his or her worst fears...
...there ways to protect children online short of shutting down chat rooms? Many Internet companies have decided that a reasonably effective method of weeding out sexual predators is to require chat room habitués to register - and pay. Users must cough up a subscription fee, along with a credit-card number and personal information that can then be used to trace the perpetrator of any future abuse. Indeed, Microsoft itself will in some nations - including the U.S., Japan and Canada - require such subscriptions of between $2 and $10 per month to gain access to MSN chat rooms...
...readying the "software" of disease control: an open, international surveillance network capable of quickly identifying the first cases. The biggest problem there is that the symptoms of SARS are so variable, making it hard to spot. Singapore's newest patient, for example, had a fever and a dry cough but lacked the telltale pneumonia of most cases. Even the best early diagnostic tests are slow and at most 80% reliable. The good news is that China, which tried to hide the extent of its outbreak last spring, has a new attitude. Guangdong has begun regularly sharing its infectious disease data...
...between an actor and the audience,' says Cronyn. 'I think the right word is empathy. You can tell immediately if you're not being heard, or if a lady is rattling a paper bag over in the sixth row, stage right, or if somebody has a bad cough. But the most magical moment in the theater is a silence so complete that you can't even hear people breathe. It means that you've got them...