Word: lethal
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...issue--whether doctors, forsaking the Hippocratic oath, should be allowed to prescribe lethal doses of medication or actively help mortally ill patients end their lives--has been moving toward center stage at least since 1990, when the court, in Cruzan v. Missouri Department of Health, established a patient's right to be taken off life support. In 1991, Quill, a New York physician, wrote in a medical journal about assisting a suicide. Meanwhile, retired Michigan pathologist Jack Kevorkian began a string of assisted or supervised deaths that now stands at 46. Three times Michigan authorities charged Kevorkian with murder...
Most people think of Updike and Cheever as the masters of postwar American suburbia. Add Yates to the master list. His greatest novel is a bitterly funny account of lethal disappointment in the Connecticut suburbs in 1955. That may sound like a common enough predicament, but Yates gives it devastating force...
...could lead to the deaths of 1.9 million Americans and the hospitalization of 8.5 million more people with costs exceeding $450 billion.” Such a scenario now seems vastly more likely with the discovery, last week, that the avian flu virus can mutate independently to become a lethal strain to humans...
...sick enough to come to the attention of health authorities, and at least 60 of them have died. So far, the vast majority have been infected through close contact with birds; human-to-human infection is still extremely rare. What gives health authorities nightmares is the possibility that the lethal H5N1 could mutate into a virus that is easily passed among humans...
...reasons that aren't entirely clear, the current H5N1 flu, unlike common flu, strikes deep within a patient's lungs, making it harder to spread to someone else and unusually lethal. Dr. Nguyen Hong Ha of Hanoi's Bach Mai Hospital has probably treated more cases than anyone else. Two-thirds of the deaths from bird flu since 2003 have occurred in Vietnam. Ha has watched the virus ravage the lungs of healthy young patients in a matter of days. He says the key to treatment is applying just the right amount of breathing assistance. Too much, and an H5N1...