Word: mucus
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...House, the transplant was a last resort in a lifelong battle with cystic fibrosis. CF victims produce abnormally thick, sticky mucus and other secretions that block normal lung function and interfere with digestion. Babies born with CF used to die in early childhood, but today more than half reach their early 20s, thanks to a battery of drugs that control lung infections, aid digestion and limit secretions. Still, few survive beyond the age of 30. House's lungs were "just about gone," according to his father, and for three years he had used an oxygen tank while he installed...
Whooping cough, named for the distinctive sound made by its victims as they gasp for air between bouts of violent coughing, was until the 1940s a major killer of children. Caused by a bacterial infection that increases the amount of mucus in the lungs, the disease sometimes results in convulsions and death. Over the past four decades, however, pertussis has been largely subdued in developed nations by mass inoculations with a vaccine made from killed pertussis bacteria. Now doctors annually pump some 18 million doses of the vaccine into U.S. children--usually in the form of a D.P.T. shot...
...basis of all biology. It's as old as life itself." So why single out the bombardier for harboring dangerous chemicals in its body? he asks. Why not the human digestive tract, for example? There the stomach walls are protected from the hydrochloric acid within by a layer of mucus, which, if damaged, would allow the potent acid to attack the stomach walls and be released into the body...
...children, is always fatal, but ravages its victims first. Girls suffer more than boys and die at a faster rate. To prolong Alex's life, Deford and his wife Carol daily had to hold her upside down and pound her chest and back to loosen the life-threatening mucus in her lungs. "Two thousand times I had to beat my sick child," her father recalls, "make her hurt and cry and plead - 'No, not the down ones, Daddy' - and in the end, for what...
Tests on the mucus, which Hyman had collected by poking a giant Q-Tip into the blowhole, revealed four different types of pneumonia bacteria. The prospects seemed bleak. But scientists dosed the animal with penicillin and began serving it squid-a sperm whale favorite. Soon it started "sitting" higher in the water, raising its head and emitting the clicking sounds that sperms seem to use for communication or echo locating...