Word: plasma
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...Plasma is a has-been-or should be. Yet each year an estimated 100,000 Americans receive transfusions of plasma, which is the almost colorless liquid portion of whole blood that has been collected from many donors and pooled. Used after burns, wounds or hemorrhage, it is credited with having saved the lives of countless accident victims and battle casualties. All too often, however, pooled plasma carries hepatitis virus, and its assorted proteins may cause severe allergic-type reactions. Last week the Division of Biologies Standards, the Federal Government's watchdog over all medicinal preparations containing blood fractions, took...
...reason some doctors continue using the liquid is the widespread belief that it can be made safe by subjecting it to ultraviolet radiation and storing it for six months at 86°-90° F. Many physicians also believe that plasma substitutes are in short supply. Neither assumption is true, say the American Red Cross and the Greater New York Community Blood Council. Salt solutions and synthetics such as dextran are plentifully available. So is serum albumin; although extracted from plasma, this can be filtered and heated sufficiently to make it noninfectious...
...year-old New York Democrat was quickly rushed to a local receiving hospital, administered the last rites of the Roman Catholic Church, given transfusions of plasma, and in less than an hour transferred for surgery to the Good Samaritan Hospital 12 blocks away...
...Lafayette, the Massachusetts' Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology, and the Soviet Academy of Sciences' Institute of Psychiatry. Independently, each had discovered increased amounts of a component of the alpha-2-globulin fraction in the blood of schizophrenia victims. Alpha-2-globulin is a normal part of blood plasma, containing many proteins. In the blood of 60% of the schizophrenics studied by Gottlieb, the fraction was present at far-above-normal levels. The excessive alpha-2-globulin, Gottlieb theorizes, may perforate brain-cell walls and cause leakages that could disrupt the organ's normal processes. Such disruptions might...
...Little Riddle. At last week's Boston meeting, Tulane University's Dr. Robert G. Heath reviewed 19 years of research on another possible biochemical agent in schizophrenia-a brain protein he calls taraxein. When extracted from human plasma and injected into monkeys, it plummets the animals into a confused, schizophrenia-like condition. The same temporary effects can be induced in human volunteers subjected to taraxein injections...