Word: crippler
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...measles (rubeola) used to strike 4 million children a year, kill 400 and leave 800 with irreparable brain damage. By last year, the total number of cases was down to 22,000; only a handful had serious consequences. Much the same is true of German measles (rubella), the crippler of the fetus during pregnancy. From a high of 58,000 reported cases (far below the true total) in 1969, the number of rubella cases dropped to 12,000 last year, and only 45 infants were born with resulting deformities. Smallpox, dreaded and widespread as recently as 1930, is virtually nonexistent...
Graham, a San Francisco anesthesiologist, paid $2,100 for insurance when she started in practice three years ago. Now she must pay $5,100 for the same coverage. Says she: "It's a real crippler...
Immunology has already led to the control of many serious illnesses. Immunological research resulted in the development of vaccines against polio, once a major crippler of children, and rubella, or German measles, which can cause serious birth defects in the children of women who contract it while pregnant. It has led to a broader understanding of allergies and an effective method of preventing erythroblastosis fetalis, a blood condition that can prove fatal to infants shortly after birth...
Cotzias has his eye on a more remote and desirable goal than the treatment of a single disease, even such a common crippler as Parkinson's. He holds with Chemist Linus Pauling (TIME, May 3) that biochemical deficiencies in the brain may masquerade as brain-tissue degeneration. The deficiencies may result from underlying damage to neurons (the electric regulators of the nervous system) or other causes, but either way they produce "electronic breaks," so that nerve impulses do not get through. Dr. Cotzias wants to find more ways of repairing more kinds of electronic breaks...
...ambitious plans apply only to the common "seven-day" measles, or rubeola-not to be confused with the three-day "German" measles or rubella, for which a vaccine has not yet been perfected. Though rubella early in pregnancy has gained an evil reputation as a killer and crippler of the unborn, it is otherwise a mild and almost harmless infection. Not so with common measles. "Of all the childhood diseases that remain," says Dr. H. Bruce Dull of the National Communicable Disease Center, "measles is the one with the most risk...