Word: pneumonia
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...dominated medicine's attention were the bacteria, hulking big microbes (by comparison with viruses) that generally attack by producing systemic poisons rather than by invading the body's cells. Antibiotics have wiped out or brought under control virtually all the major bacterial diseases: tuberculosis, some forms of pneumonia, diphtheria, scarlet fever, typhoid fever, gonorrhea, syphilis and most of the other illnesses that stir memories of Paul de Kruif's heroic Microbe Hunters...
Through the Filter. Enders worked at first on tuberculosis and bacterial pneumonia. But in the early '30s there was growing awareness of the importance of smaller infectious particles, so small that, with negligible exceptions, they were invisible to medical researchers under even the strongest microscopes...
Bacterial pneumonia, once a major killer, is now largely controlled by sulfa drugs and antibiotics. Viral pneumonia is another matter. Believed to be caused by many kinds of viruses, and called primary atypical pneumonia (PAP) by doctors, the disease presents an uncomfortable array of symptoms. The patient usually does not get suddenly ill; he gradually gets coldlike symptoms, distressing headaches, rising temperature, chills, and a severe cough. The sickness may last weeks, though it rarely kills...
Chasing a Bug. For years, researchers have been trying to isolate and assess the role of PAP viruses. In 1944, Harvard Virologist Monroe Eaton found in the sputum of some pneumonia patients an agent that caused PAP. So far, researchers have not been able to prove for sure that "Eaton Agent" is a virus. It goes through fine filters and thus seems to fall in the sub-bacterial size-range of the viruses. Like some other viruses, it can be grown in chick embryos and hamsters. Using new fluorescent techniques, researchers have traced the antibodies that are formed to fight...
Finding a Drug. The first good chance to determine how widespread Eaton Agent pneumonia is came two years ago, when Marine recruits at Parris Island. S.C., flooded into the local Navy dispensary displaying pneumonia symptoms. Since the recruits represented an easily controllable population for the purposes of study, Navy doctors, headed by Captain James R. Kingston and assisted by the National Institutes of Health, went to work. They separated PAP patients from recruits suffering from other respiratory diseases, took sputum for culturing and blood samples for testing. They found that 68% of the recruits displaying PAP symptoms were infected with...