Word: mumu
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Many a Pacific veteran came home with the gnawing fear that he was less of a man. Reason for the fear was a popular belief that virility is impaired or destroyed by mumu (filariasis), a disease which 10,000 U.S. servicemen contracted in the Southwest Pacific. Doctors tried to reassure them, but some victims were convinced that the long, slim worms in their lymph glands would eventually cause elephantiasis (natives of the tropics who have it are grotesquely swollen masses of flesh...
...ease the brooders' minds once & for all, Captain Lowell T. Coggeshall, tropical disease expert of the University of Michigan, took a poll of mumu convalescents at an Army hospital near Klamath Falls, Ore. His finding, reported without comment in California and Western Medicine: mumu men have fathered twice as many babies as wormless veterans...
...Called mumu by Samoans, filariasis develops from the worm Wuchereria bancrofti, carried by certain species of mosquitoes. Injected into the blood stream, the baby worm (microfilaria) eventually may grow nearly four inches long. It lodges in the lymph glands, where it reproduces itself. First visible symptoms are painful swellings of an arm, leg or the scrotum. Doctors have been less alarmed than troops by the disease, because even with repeated infections, less than 10% of the cases develop elephantiasis, and symptoms usually disappear after return to a temperate climate. But the disease's monstrous effects on native sufferers...
...drug has some toxic effects on man (vomiting, a skin rash), but Dr. Brown thinks they are not so bad as mumu...