Word: pneumonia
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...reason one elderly man died. And just a few weeks ago, 1,200 disgruntled passengers were evacuated from the ocean liner Horizon in Bermuda because of the threat of Legionnaires' disease. Among customers on previous Horizon voyages this summer, there have been 11 confirmed cases of the potentially fatal pneumonia-like illness and 24 suspected cases. At least one victim died...
...first widespread use of antibiotics in the years following World War II had transformed the most terrifying diseases known to humanity -- tuberculosis, syphilis, pneumonia, bacterial meningitis and even bubonic plague -- into mere inconveniences that if caught in time could be cured with pills or shots. Like many who went through medical school in the 1960s, Dr. Bernard Fields, a Harvard microbiologist, remembers being told, "Don't bother going into infectious diseases." It was a declining specialty, his mentors advised -- better to concentrate on real problems like cancer and heart disease...
They have many other ways of picking up genes as well. The DNA can come from viruses, which have acquired it while infecting other microbes. Some types of pneumococcus, which causes a form of pneumonia, even indulge in a microbial version of necrophilia by soaking up DNA that spills out of dead or dying bacteria. This versatility means bacteria can acquire useful traits without having to wait for mutations in the immediate family...
...predicted that she would be going home by early fall. In May, though, things suddenly changed. Angela caught a simple cold, the kind that she had overcome before. But then her temperature soared. On Wednesday two weeks ago, she began having trouble breathing. Doctors suspected she was developing pneumonia...
When a 32-year-old man suddenly died in Johnson City, Tennessee, in 1985, the local medics assumed the cause to be pneumonia. After they found out it was AIDS, some of them made tasteless jokes about the man's sexuality and others suggested they bury his respirator. It was not that they were ill-intentioned, as Abraham Verghese points out in My Own Country (Simon & Schuster; 347 pages; $23); it was simply that AIDS, to say nothing of homosexuality, was something that happened somewhere else. For a quiet Bible Belt town of dance halls and churches (72 of them...