Word: meningococci
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More cases appeared in scattered barracks. As usual, the medics could not trace the paths by which infection spread. Thousands of recruits had meningococci in their throats, but did not get sick. There was no way to predict which few men would develop a life-threatening infection that would race through the bloodstream and attack their meninges-the covering of the brain and spinal cord...
...meningitis among 12,000 seamen recruits, and they were confident that they were doing just what was needed to guard against another attack. They issued mountains of sulfadiazine tablets, and ordered everybody on the base to take two a day. The dosage was supposed to clean out transient meningococci, the microbes that cause this form of inflammation of the brain covering. But for five weeks, sporadic new cases of meningitis kept cropping up. The Navy flew in Dr. Harry A. Feldman, the nation's top authority on the meningococcus, and the specialist from Syracuse, N.Y., ran blood tests...
Though many people regularly carry meningococci in their throats without getting sick, no one knows why spinal or brain disease appears, especially in springtime, in an unpredictable pattern. Only one other man in Wilkowski's company got meningitis, but so did three others in companies widely scattered over the huge base. And one of these, James S. Hale, 22, of Osborne, Kans., fell victim to a furiously progressive form of the disease, reminiscent of the old-fashioned epidemics. It was 5:30 p.m. when Hale went to sick bay, and after a spinal tap he was rushed...
There was a third and worse possibility: meningococci, which could kill Mary within an hour or two. Dr. Burkhardt dared not delay either treatment or hospitalization. He ordered one of the clinic's two radio-equipped sedans rigged with an infusion bottle hung from the coat hook and bundled Mary into the car. A Navajo staff member drove the 90 miles (much of it over spring-breaking dirt roads) to Fort Defiance, while Burkhardt squatted by the patient, gave her a continuous intravenous infusion of sulfadiazine...
That soap and hot water will kill pneumococci, streptococci, gonococci, meningococci, diphtheria bacilli, and the syphilis spirochete, doctors have long known. Last week in the Journal of Experimental Medicine, Bacteriologists Charles Chester Stock and Thomas Francis Jr. of New York University told of their successful experiments in making influenza vaccine from virus and soap solution...