Word: influenza
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...comes in winter and is harder to dodge than a speeding snowball. This year the debilitating and sometimes deadly scourge of influenza is unusually virulent. So many people have taken to their bed with chills, aching muscles and fever that doctors are overwhelmed, offices are decimated, and some schools have temporarily shut their doors. Nearly 8,100 Americans, most of them elderly, are known to have died of flu and flu-related illnesses, and the figure is rising daily. The Centers for Disease Control has officially declared it an epidemic, the worst outbreak...
Antibiotics like penicillin and tetracycline are mixed into animal feed for similar reasons. The low doses enhance growth and ward off ailments such as influenza and intestinal diseases, which are caused by the overcrowding and confinement common to factory farming. About half of all antibiotics sold in the U.S. today are fed to farm animals...
...dealt with large scale public health campaigns before. In the 1970s, during a severe influenza outbreak, UHS organized a massive inoculation effort. "It was planned for months. There was a cast of thousands. We administered 10,000 shots in three days," Postel says...
...they don't get it in time, there's a risk of an influenza epidemic" among older people, he said...
Building on Pasteur's work, 20th century scientists have learned to mass- produce bacteria and viruses, then weaken or kill them and use them as the major ingredient in vaccines for such varied diseases as typhus, yellow fever, influenza, polio, measles and rubella. Unfortunately, the vaccines occasionally cause the disease they are designed to ward off. (Reason: the "killed" viruses sometimes survive, while the weakened versions often fail to cause an immune response.) In general, however, the vaccines have been quite effective; in recent years the National Academy of Sciences has reported only a handful of polio and diphtheria cases...