Word: diphtheria
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...fold increase in Germany." Belgium was recovering from a polio epidemic. But the diseases that worry UNRRA most are 1) tuberculosis, which kills those weakened by exposure and starvation, 2) influenza, which has not yet hit in force (though many Berliners had it last week), 3) the strangely virulent diphtheria which struck hundreds of thousands of central and northern Europeans in 1942 and 1943 (TIME, June...
...immediate reaction of oldtime lepers and their doctors to any new drug is disbelief. They have seen all sorts of medicines-gold solution, diphtheria toxoid, etc.-touted and then dropped. Even chaulmoogra oil, which seemed to do some good, although it was often painful or made patients sick, has fallen into disfavor (TIME, Feb. 26, 1940). Recently the regime of a tuberculosis sanitarium-rest, good food, good care-has become the only standard treatment. By this regime alone, some 10% to 20% of leprosy cases are eventually arrested. "Cured" is a word leprologists have never dared...
...seed of epidemics has multiplied and spread during the war. In twelve continental European countries, incidence of cerebrospinal meningitis, poliomyelitis, typhoid, dysentery, diphtheria and scarlet fever has more than doubled since war began. But as the world had less disease in 1939 than in 1914, infection is still low compared with...
...Diphtheria has proved to be "the leading epidemic disease of the war on the European continent." In 1943 there were nearly 300,000 cases in Germany, 150,000 in The Netherlands in the last three years. The disease has occurred in wounds and has attacked an abnormally large proportion of adults. The bacteria are unusually virulent; some cases do not respond to early serum treatment, which is ordinarily a lifesaver...
Based on New York City records (considered typical of U.S. cities), the chart shows the general trend of changes in death rates, by diseases, since 1930. Thanks to universal vaccination, sulfa drugs, penicillin, etc., the mortality from most germ diseases is dropping toward the vanishing point (diphtheria deaths, for example, dropped from a yearly average of 1,290 in 1910-19 to seven in 1944). But deaths from degenerative diseases have risen sharply, and are still rising...