Word: diphtheria
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Average life expectancy at birth was 34.5 years for men and 36.5 years for women. Fifty percent of deaths occurred in those under ten years of age. Infectious diseases decimated the population. Smallpox and yellow fever were most feared. Tuberculosis, cholera and dysentery, typhoid, diphtheria, measles and mumps were ever present. Malaria was as common in New England as on the Southern plantations. In 1721, almost half the population of Boston caught smallpox, and more than 7% died. Yellow fever wiped out 10% of the population of Philadelphia...
...purpose: the "borning room"-much used because the children came one after the other and, alas, died far more often than is now the case. Historians estimate that year in, year out, about a third or more of all children died in infancy-in typhoid and smallpox epidemics, of diphtheria, dysentery and respiratory ailments. Measles exacted a frightful toll. And, of course, parents were helpless to do much except pray and wait. The medical "treatments" of the day were themselves a major source of sickness and even death: bloodletting, purging and bizarre concoctions...
...particularly pertinent section concerns early traumas. The family move from Mississippi to St. Louis, when Tennessee was about eight years old, was devastating to the boy. In his mind, it became an expulsion from the Elysian fields to a dingy urban purgatory. He promptly contracted something diagnosed as diphtheria, which rendered him bedridden and turned his nature inward toward solitary fantasy. The resemblance to O'Neill's bout with TB is unmistakable...
...York, for example, State Health Commissioner Robert P. Whalen reports that about 20% of the 300,000 children due to enter first grade have not been immunized against polio, measles or rubella. Most of them are not even protected against diphtheria, the vaccine for which is included in the three-way D.T.P. (diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis) shots that have long been standard treatment for all infants. In some areas, Whalen says, less than half of the entering class have been immunized. There have been similar or even greater drop-offs in vaccinations among preschool children in most other states...
...their weakened condition, disease has spread quickly. Typhus, dysentery, measles and gastroenteritis are rampant. At the teeming Lazaret camp near Niamey, Niger's capital, cholera threatens the 15,000 refugees. In Chad, some emaciated nomads begged a U.N. official not to send them medicines, pleading that death from diphtheria was quicker and hence easier than the slower death from starvation...