Word: influenzae
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...more exotic explanation was posed in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1985 by Dr. Alexander Langmuir, formerly chief epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. Thucydides' description, Langmuir theorized, fit the criteria for influenza complicated by toxic shock syndrome. And although this peculiar combination of ailments had never been observed by modern physicians, Langmuir predicted that "Thucydides syndrome," as he called it, "may reappear," perhaps as part of some future epidemic of influenza...
...been more clairvoyant. In a recent issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, doctors at the Minnesota Department of Health and the University of Virginia reported a total of ten cases of suspected Thucydides syndrome -- flu complicated by TSS. Nine of the cases occurred during a major influenza outbreak in Minnesota in the winter of 1985-86. One occurred in Roanoke, Va., and an eleventh case, in Oregon, has since been reported to the CDC. Like the Athenian scourge, the two-part illness was lethal: six of the patients died. Langmuir says the apparent fulfillment of his prophecy...
MacDonald speculates that the influenza virus can injure the throat or lungs in a way that favors the growth of S. aureus. Though the complication appears to be rare, it is urgent that doctors be aware of it, says TSS Expert Bruce Dan, in an editorial that accompanied MacDonald's paper. Early recognition and treatment of the syndrome "is the most important factor in being able to prevent fatalities," says Dan. "It behooves all physicians to be on the lookout for any influenza patient whose condition suddenly worsens...
...current rate, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta predicts, the total number of cases will reach 270,000 over the next five years, while total AIDS deaths will rise to 179,000. Fearsome as that count is, it falls short of the tolls taken by the influenza epidemic of 1918-19 (500,000 U.S. deaths) and by polio in the mid-'40s to mid-'50s (360,000 cases with 20,000 deaths). But then again, AIDS is still gathering steam...
...that his life, or the first 42 years of it covered here, has been uneventful. In early 1919, around the time of Burgess's second birthday, his mother and older sister died of Spanish influenza. His father, on a furlough from the British army, walked into his Manchester lodgings on a horrid scene: "I, apparently, was chuckling in my cot while my mother and sister lay dead on a bed in the same room." At the end of Little Wilson and Big God, on a Christmas holiday in 1959, the author is told that he has an inoperable brain tumor...