Word: fungal
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...such natural explanations. Spokesman Alan Romberg pointed out that one sample of a yellow raindrop weighed 300 mg, which, he said, "is certainly more than a bee could drop." The greatest flaw in Meselson's theory, Romberg continued, is that it fails to explain why yellow rain contains fungal poisons, or mycotoxins, which are present in doses large enough to kill a man, let alone a bee. The Government contends that mycotoxins have been found in the bodies of Asian victims of Soviet spraying and in the blood and urine of survivors...
Former Secretary of State Alexander Haig had previously made the accusation last year in West Berlin. According to last week's report, the U.S. has obtained from yellow-rain victims numerous blood, urine and tissue samples that are contaminated with rare fungal poisons known as mycotoxins, the key lethal ingredient in yellow rain. At a press conference that followed Shultz's statement, State Department officials showed one of two Soviet gas masks that they said had been captured in Afghanistan. One taken from the head of a dead Soviet soldier, the other obtained clandestinely in Kabul, each apparently...
...isolated village, spraying a yellowish cloud or dropping bombs that burst in a shower of sticky beads. The rain, says the survivor of an April attack, feels "wet like rain and hot like chilies." The lethal ingredient of yellow rain is a poorly understood class of mycotoxins, or fungal poisons, known as trichothecenes, that apparently kill by rupturing blood vessels and inhibiting the blood's clotting ability. Within minutes of a yellow rain attack, villagers' eyes start to burn; soon after that, their skin erupts in blisters, and as internal bleeding begins, they vomit blood...
...carinii pneumonia, a deadly disease rarely seen except in drug-weakened cancer and transplant patients. Others bore the purplish skin lesions of Kaposi's sarcoma, a cancer that is usually confined to elderly men of Mediterranean extraction and young males in Equatorial Africa. Still others had developed strange fungal infections or other rare cancers. All had one thing in common: an immune system so severely impaired that they were living playgrounds for infectious agents. As soon as one bug could be brought under control, these patients would fall prey to another, gradually wasting away...
...thanks to an important new drug called cyclosporine, the heart transplant may become the more nearly routine operation doctors once envisioned. Developed by the Swiss firm Sandoz Ltd., cyclosporine is a natural fungal compound that somehow blocks the production of those white cells that cause rejection but not those that fight infection. Says Dr. Barry Kahan, head of the organ-transplant division of the University of Texas Medical School at Houston and a colleague of Cooley's: "This is the secret ingredient, the thing that unlocks the door to transplants...