Word: culprit
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...recent months, local governments may have come to appreciate better the problems afflicting their North American neighbor: coca abuse has begun to spread across South America. The greatest culprit is a brown, pennies-cheap cigarette made of an addictive low-grade coca paste. Often known as brutos, the cigarettes contain impurities that have not been processed out, including caustic soda, sulfuric acid and kerosene. The cheap high, once favored only by teenage street kids, has now hooked a significant cross-section of society...
...first, doctors suspected that the polio virus had somehow remained latent in PPMA victims, only to be reactivated. But unlike polio, PPMA is never fatal, and it progresses far more slowly than the original disease. That would seem to rule out the polio virus as the culprit. A more likely cause may be the toll taken on healthy nerve cells by years of overcompensating for those destroyed by the disease. Many polio survivors, says Perry, "are functioning at 50% of their muscle strength most of the time, whereas healthy people stay under 20%." For this reason, the nerve cells...
...budget deficits threatened to stifle the economy for years ahead. Scowled Regan: "As far as I am concerned, you can throw it away." He has blamed high interest rates on the monetary policy of the Federal Reserve Board, not the heavy federal borrowing requirements created by high deficits, the culprit cited by most economists. At one point he went so far as to assert that "there is no necessary cause-effect link between deficits and interest rates." Asked last year if he agreed with Regan's assessment of the deficit situation, Exxon Corp. Chairman Clifton Garvin Jr. responded tartly...
Furthermore, the announcement that fiberglass may be the culprit, caused some surprise because at te time the rashes broke out, the office itself seemed to be free of contaminator, office workers said. Whether fiberglass dust may circulate invisibly in the air was not immediately clear...
Some 100,000 Americans contract hepatitis each year from blood transfusions. In 90% of the cases, the culprit is a mystery virus that can be identified only by a process of elimination: when tests confirm that it is neither Type A nor Type B hepatitis, a diagnosis of nonA, non-B is made. For years scientists have sought to find the unseen villain. Last week researchers at the Food and Drug Administration announced a breakthrough...