Word: lethality
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Yale School of Medicine researcher is recovering from a rare and potentially lethal disease called Sabia virus. Before 1990, the illness was unknown to medicine. Then a woman in the town of Sabia, Brazil, died from a mysterious virus that had evidently been circulating in local rodents for years before making an assault on humans. Brazilian doctors sent samples to Yale, and a month ago the scientist became infected when he accidentally broke a container holding the virus. Health officials point out that it is not easily passed between humans, but some 80 people who came into contact with...
...notorious flare-up in Gloucestershire, England, of what the press dubbed flesh-eating bacteria alerted people to the dangers of streptococcus-A infections. The common bacteria that cause strep throat generally produce no lasting harm if properly treated, but certain virulent strains can turn lethal. Strep-A infections claim thousands of lives each year in the U.S. and Europe alone...
...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...