Word: influenza
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With enteric pathogens the danger of secondary cases is even less, for with this class of agents modern sanitation provides infinitely better control than we can provide for respiratory infection: in contrast to influenza, the appearance of a case of typhoid in a home does not lead to an epidemic. Enteric epidemics appear only with inadequate personal hygiene or sanitation, and such epidemics are always small (except when sewage freely enters the water supply...
Scientists in the Public Health Service persuaded Congress--and tried to persuade the public--that an influenza epidemic as devastating as that of 1918 was likely to occur this winter. The scientists also claimed that in six months they could produce a safe and effective vaccine to protect against this new strain of influenza...
...immunization is a chancy business. (Since the virus changes so frequently, flu immunization is also a profitable business for a few drug companies.) Officials at the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta were correct in assuming that this year, or next, or the one after a new strain of influenza would appear, but they were wrong in believing they could finally prevent a flu epidemic. The odds of predicting correctly what new strain will appear are small; when it arrives, in other words, the new strain probably will not be swine flu, but something entirely different...
...influenza strain would pose no grave danger to healthy children or adults. Strains of flu cause more illness in their first year--and the illness they cause is more debilitating--than afterwards. To the elderly and to those with chronic illnesses, the prospect is frightening. To everyone else, the prospect is merely unpleasant. Moreover, the analogies to 1918 were misleading, since in that year's epidemic most deaths were caused by bacterial infections secondary to flu that now can be combatted with antibiotics...
Soon, however, Morris again began to make his superiors uncomfortable. He asked whether slow-acting viruses in seemingly safe vaccines might cause serious illness decades after inoculation. He suggested that one now influenza vaccine might cause tumors, and charged that a major cell strain in which polio vaccine is grown was contaminated...