Word: plasma
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...clock crept toward 11:15 p.m. last Thursday, the 500 scientists and engineers packed into the control room and an adjacent auditorium at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory kept their eyes riveted on a bank of computer monitors. They waited anxiously as technicians injected less than 1 oz. of tritium gas into the doughnut-shaped hollow at the heart of a 50-ft.- tall reactor in the next room. Then they waited some more as the tritium mixed with deuterium gas already inside and the combination was heated with powerful radio beams...
...think they're coming down with the flu, especially those living in the Southwest, should beware: the aches, fevers and coughs could mean something far worse. A mysterious ailment emerged last spring in which flulike symptoms become life threatening as tiny blood vessels throughout the lungs begin leaking plasma. Gasping for breath, victims literally start to drown in their own body fluids. The outcome in 27 of the first 45 known cases of the illness has been a quick death...
...official response did little to calm fears. Health Minister Horst Seehofer recommended that anybody who had received blood products since 1982 undergo a test for HIV -- which caused a run on testing sites. Hospitals were laboriously checking records to identify patients who received blood from UB Plasma, but the task was huge and the records were not always clear on the source of the products used...
...news of potential contamination of Germany's blood supply hit like a bombshell in a country already shocked by a decade-old scandal implicating negligent health officials in a cover-up of HIV-infected blood. The reports of HIV cases from UB Plasma blood raised fears among millions who had received transfusions over the past eight years. Hospitals were flooded with calls from former patients, and health administrators faced a rash of cancellations of elective surgery. "People aren't just afraid, they're panicking," said Erhard Seifried of the German Red Cross...
German officials may be guilty of laxity in policing the blood industry, especially UB Plasma. From 1985 to 1989 the firm operated without a license by exploiting a loophole in the law permitting production of small batches of plasma with case-by-case approval. In 1987 a UB Plasma worker told government officials that the company was distributing questionable blood products. The company's recent poor financial condition went unnoticed by regulators...