Word: germs
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Frail Germ. What makes these woeful numbers so astonishing is that syphilis is completely preventable, and in its earlier stages is completely curable with inexpensive penicillin. More remarkable...
William J. Brown of the U.S. Government's Communicable Disease Center pointed out, the spirochete of syphilis is "about as frail as a germ can be and still survive." So delicate that it can be cultivated only with difficulty in laboratory animals and hardly ever in the test tube, it flourishes nowhere but in the body...
Even there, the spirochete can stand so little heat that artificial fever was once a treatment for syphilis. The germ gets no free ride on food, air, water, or from insects. It can attack a new victim only through the most intimate contact, and then only during a relatively brief time...
This summer Rinker & Co. set up "institutes" at 20 universities from Cornell to California, gave 900 teachers a stiff dose of everything from satire to syntax. Supposedly the nation's best English teachers, they are expected to go home as "germ carriers" after a graduate-level summer tour of literature, linguistics and composition. Rinker is pleased-but not nearly as pleased as he hoped...
Happily, they remained undaunted. "It's like being born again," said one woman teacher. Inspired by their encounter with Greek rhetoric, 21 teachers even launched a new syllabus for teaching expository writing in high schools. Still to be seen is how much of an epidemic such germ carriers can start back home...