Word: distinguishing
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...based diagnostic tests are also under development for Lyme disease, tuberculosis and viral meningitis. Present tests for tuberculosis, which involve culturing and growing the bacteria, take up to a month to confirm a diagnosis. PCR can do the job in a few hours. Current tests are unable to distinguish viral meningitis quickly from the far more dangerous bacterial form of the disease, which is most common in infancy. As a result, all babies found to have meningitis are treated as if they had the more lethal form. With a PCR diagnosis, those with viral meningitis could be spared unnecessary hospitalization...
Officially, none of this is happening. "Most of the Palestinians helped Kuwaitis during the Iraqi occupation," says Prime Minister Saad. Yet Saad's failure to define collaboration has made it impossible to distinguish between true disloyalty to Kuwait and acts undertaken merely to survive. The elaborate money-distribution scheme that provided almost $200 million for bribes and food during the occupation served only Kuwaitis. "Why is someone who worked in order to live -- and only because the government wouldn't support him as it was supporting Kuwaitis -- a collaborator?" asks Sana Salah, a Palestinian computer programmer...
...Arbitron data. Despite the current plateau in ad spending, U.S. companies have doubled their outlays, from $63 billion in 1984 to last year's $129 billion. At the same time, the great array of new products flooding the American marketplace has made it harder for individual brands to distinguish themselves from the pack...
...added essay, Avoiding Sexist Language, offers some useful gender-neutral suggestions (firefighter instead of fireman). Yet browsers will find as well the stamp of acceptance on the dreadful herstory ("an alternative form to distinguish or emphasize the particular experience of women"); the execrable womyn ("alternative spelling to avoid the suggestion of sexism perceived in the sequence m-e-n"); and the absurd wait-person (waiter or waitress) and waitron ("a person of either sex who waits on tables"). Future lexicons, perhaps, will give us waitoid (a person of indeterminate sex who waits on tables...
...considered for possible adoption by Indonesia and the Philippines, seems harmless enough. Every citizen over age 15 will be required to carry a card bearing a color photo, various pertinent facts (name, address and so on) and an identification number. Most Thais are happy to get their IDs, which distinguish citizens from noncitizens (including a large population of refugees) and simplify all sorts of bureaucratic transactions, from receiving health-care benefits to enrolling a child in school...