Word: diphtheria
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...village elders of Marsella, 6,300 feet up in Colombia's Cauca Valley, weighed the arguments and gave consent -yes, it would be a good idea to give the district's youngsters inoculations against whooping cough and diphtheria. Thereupon, the traveling "sanitary educator," Roberto Agudelo Valencia, 32, jumped into his jeep, switched on the public-address system and drove around announcing a movie in the village square...
Another index is in the disease rates. Whooping cough has been reduced by 90% to 95% in cities where the program was started two years ago, and diphtheria has been cut by 65% to 70%. Nobody knows how many children's lives have been or can be saved, because Colombia's vital statistics are too sketchy. But where something like one-sixth of all children have been dying before the age of five, there is plenty of room for lifesaving...
...tuberculin test, which shows whether the subject has (or has ever had) tuberculosis, and Schick thought the same idea might be applied to other diseases. What he got was slightly different but more valuable: a remarkably accurate and fairly simple test which shows whether a subject is vulnerable to diphtheria...
...ancient Hebrews decreed that a warning blast should be sounded on the shofar to mark the third case of an infectious disease in a community, but diphtheria rated a shofar warning for the very first case. Few diseases have been so dreaded as diphtheria, partly because it is especially deadly for children in the tender two-to-five age bracket. Last week Yeshiva University in New York City held a special convocation to give an honorary degree to a physician who had done much to take the dread out of diphtheria: Bela Schick, the little-known man behind the famous...
When Bela Schick was still a boy in Hungary, German researchers tracked down the microbe which causes diphtheria, and isolated the poisonous secretion which makes a strange, strangling membrane grow across many a victim's throat. They got as far as developing a horse serum which could be used either as a preventive against the disease or as a remedy after it had struck. But so many people got sick from the serum itself that doctors hated to give it as a preventive unless they could be sure that it was really necessary. They needed a test to show...