Word: lethal
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Then, with little warning, the Soviet empire collapsed, shedding its Baltic republics, and leaving small Communist dictators around the world without sponsors. Suddenly, Castro was not a lethal security threat, but only a second-rate, graying tyrant on a small island off the coast of Florida...
...question ceased to be, When will infectious diseases be wiped out? and became, Where will the next deadly new plague appear? Scientists are keeping a nervous watch on such lethal agents as the Marburg and Ebola viruses in Africa and the Junin, Machupo and Sabia viruses in South America. And there are uncountable threats that haven't even been named: a virus known only as "X" emerged from the rain forest in southern Sudan last year, killed thousands and disappeared. No one knows when it might arise again...
...coming of penicillin and other antibiotics, bacterial diseases simply ran their courses. Either the immune system fought them off and the patient survived or the battle was lost. But antibiotics changed the contest radically: they selectively killed bacteria without harming the body's cells. For the first time, potentially lethal infections could be stopped before they got a foothold...
...cholera epidemic that has killed as many as 50,000 people in Rwandan refugee camps is that it involves a strain of bacterium that can't be treated with standard antibiotics. Relief agencies had to scramble for the right medicines, which gave the disease a head start in its lethal rampage...
...just new viruses that have doctors worried. Perhaps the most ominous prospect of all is a virulent strain of influenza. Even garden-variety flu can be deadly to the very old, the very young and those with weak immune systems. But every so often, a highly lethal strain emerges -- usually from domesticated swine in Asia. Unlike hiv, flu moves through the air and is highly contagious. The last killer strain showed up in 1918 and claimed 20 million lives -- more than all the combat deaths in World War I. And that was before global air travel; the next outbreak could...