Word: mucus
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...them play," explains Dr. Alice Brandfonbrener, director of Northwestern University's program. Some clinics boast practice rooms and videotaping equipment. Solutions can be as simple as recommending a reduced performance schedule, muscle-strengthening exercises or changes in diet. Actors and singers with voice difficulties are often told to avoid mucus-producing foods like milk and cheese. Technique may also be modified. Eric Jensen, a jazz guitarist in San Francisco with persistent pain in his left arm, was advised to shorten the scale lengths on the neck of the instrument and use lighter strings...
...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...