Word: hammons
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...William McDowell Hammon, Pittsburgh epidemiologist, told the American Public Health Association in Cleveland that "significant protection" against the paralyzing effects of polio can be given by inoculating children in epidemic areas with gamma globulin...
...Which? Dr. Hammon was reporting on results of the $1,000,000 tests (paid for by the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis) in Provo, Utah, Sioux City, Iowa, and Houston (TIME, July 14). In all, 54,772 children aged one to eleven got inoculations while polio epidemics were raging. Half the children received shots of gamma globulin, the small fraction of human blood which contains protective antibodies. The other half received useless (but harmless) gelatin. Nobody, not even the doctors, knew at the time which child got which shot...
When all these facts were known, the records went to the foundation, which checked each victim's syringe number against the manufacturer's list to see whether the child had had G.G. or gelatin. The results reported by Dr. Hammon were heartening: of more than 27,000 children who received gamma globulin, only 2 developed paralytic polio; of an equal number who received gelatin, 64 suffered some paralysis. And, Dr. Hammon added, it looks as though the attacks were milder and shorter-lived for children who had G.G. than for the others...
Neither Pat nor her mother, nor Dr. York, nor even Dr. William McDowell Hammon, the Pittsburgh epidemiologist in charge of the mass test, knew whether Pat got gamma globulin or ineffective (but harmless) gelatin. In that secrecy was the key to the whole experiment. The only way to find out whether gamma globulin can prevent paralysis from polio in humans as it has in monkeys (TIME, April 28) is to give it to tens of thousands of children, and give something else (to cut out the possible effects of suggestion) to an equal number of children under identical conditions...
...gesture for a lieutenant general. Hammon and his fellow marines would never forget it. But for Matthew Bunker Ridgway, a soldier who possesses a passionate sense of detail, an instinct for the bonds that unite a commander and his troops, and a nice flair for showmanship, it was no effort at all. A few minutes later the general climbed into his helicopter and whirred off to another sector of his front line...