Word: filariae
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Whole villages in southern Mexico are threatened with mass blindness as an obscure disease sweeps the tropical, coffee-growing state of Chiapas. Thus far Government sanitary brigades have only sized up the enemy-a kind of filaria or threadworm, whose eggs are spread from victim to victim by gnats. The eggs develop into hairlike parasites, some 20 inches long, which work their way through the body toward the head and shoulders. There they reproduce and multiply into tangled masses, forming cysts...
Filariasis, another parasite disease, affecting as much as 98% of the population in the highland slopes of Guatemala. The filariae, which are carried by coffee flies, sometimes produce bright green nodules as large as walnuts on the scalp; these fibrous nodes must be dug out by surgery. Another type of filaria, mosquito-borne, is widely prevalent in the West Indies, causes elephantiasis, grotesque swelling of the arms, legs, buttocks, sexual organs. No effective ways have yet been found of treating this ailment...
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