Word: kidney
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Just how the streptococci cause the kidney inflammation, however, is not yet known. It is not by direct infection. Likeliest explanation, said Dr. Thompson, is an immune reaction. The inflamed kidneys take weeks or months to return to normal. Children are more likely than adults to develop nephritis. But 90% of children, as against only 50% of adults, recover completely...
Micrometer Precision. About as big as its owner's fist, the human kidney is a biochemical filter with incredibly delicate powers of discrimination. It is also a prodigious worker (see diagram, left). All the water that anyone consumes in food or drink must go into the blood and be extracted by the kidneys before it can be voided as urine-contrary to the beer drinker's cliche "It goes right through you." Kidneys also work fast: the malodorous sulphur compound in asparagus is extracted and begins to be excreted in a couple of hours...
...Each kidney contains a million filtration units called nephrons. Each nephron is made up of a tuft of microscopic blood vessels, called a glomerulus, and each of these has a minute tubule at tached (see diagram, right). When blood flows into the glomeruli and around the tubules, one-fifth of its water content is led aside for finer filtration. One hundredth part of this is extracted and passes eventually to the bladder...
Many things can go wrong with so complex and delicate a piece of machinery, and most kidney diseases have forbiddingly polysyllabic names. The majority of them end in -ids, meaning that the affected part of the kidney is inflamed. The others end in -osis, meaning that there is something wrong and that it is not inflammation, but beyond that the doctors are stumped...
Immune Reaction. One of the common types of kidney disease, said Cornell's Dr. David D. Thompson, is inflammation of the filtering system itself, called glomerulonephritis. Richard Bright, who died before Pasteur even suggested the microbial theory of infectious diseases, noted that many victims of this kidney disorder had recently recovered from scarlet fever. Now that scarlet fever is known to be caused by streptococci, said Dr. Thompson, physicians can predict an outbreak of nephritis after a scarlet-fever epidemic...