Word: coughs
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...Center for Disease Control announced last week that whooping cough was on the rise again. Whooping cough is one of those conditions, like "morning sickness," that's terribly undernamed. It sounds like the sort of disease a clown might have, instead of the sort of disease that can make you cough so violently you break a rib. Pertussis, the name used by people who have medical degrees and are therefore too dignified to use "oop" words, is a little scarier, but still could be a scalp condition...
...Conditions That Your Child Almost Certainly Has" book on my shelves. I usually work back from CF, through lung cancer, pneumonia, asthma, pertussis, bronchitis, and finally, good old upper respiratory tract infection, which is what a cold gets called these days. Is this some weird corollary to the whooping cough rule - the less scary the disease, the scarier the name? I've even had my baby tested for anthrax. She didn't have it, even though we live mere blocks from a post office...
...that I know whooping cough numbers are up, I'll have to linger over the list of symptoms in that part of the chart to try to project them on to my offspring. The baby + phlegm cocktail is one of the most brutal for mothers. Once stricken, infant nasal passages are so small that any mucus makes their breathing sound like Darth Vader in the final stages of emphysema. You keep wishing: "if it only it could be me who has the cold, instead of her." And before you know it, presto...
...going to stop being anxious about whooping cough. I'm too busy anyway, what with the outbreak of a mysterious rash in elementary schools in Philadelphia. That's only two hours drive from my place...
...days of George Washington, when Edward Jenner first scraped the scabs from milkmaids infected with cowpox to inoculate people against smallpox. By the end of the 20th century, vaccines had conquered many of man's most dreaded plagues, eliminating smallpox and all but wiping out mumps, measles, rubella, whooping cough, diphtheria and polio, at least in the developed world. Vaccines had done their work so well, in fact, that in the context of 21st century medicine, with its smart drugs and high-tech interventions, they seemed almost quaint and out of date, a kind of biomedical backwater...