Word: polio
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...people have spent more than $60,000,000 righting polio. What have they got for their money? Up to now, nothing that looks remotely like a preventive or cure. But scientists now have the ugly measurements of the disease, and they think they may be getting somewhere-in the laboratory...
Last week their progress and defeats were summed up in a book (The Challenge of Polio, Dial Press, $2.50) by Author-Bacteriologist Roland H. Berg, aided by the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis...
Choosy Virus. Poliomyelitis is weird, unpredictable. At least as old as the ancient Egyptians (whose murals showed twisted figures obviously crippled by polio), it did not become epidemic until the 19th Century. The tiny virus that causes it (one of the smallest known) attacks only nerve cells, is almost never found in the blood. The disease occurs naturally only in man; researchers have been able to reproduce it artificially only in monkeys, cotton rats and specially bred mice (by injection of certain strains of the virus). Because its symptoms-sore throat, fever, headache, nausea, muscle stiffness-are much like those...
...disease seems to strike hardest at the healthiest; because children with vitamin deficiencies seem to resist infection, doctors surmise that the polio virus does not thrive on undernourished body cells...
...Communities with much fluorine in their water have about 75% less tooth decay than those with little fluorine. Studies of Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin show that high-fluorine communities also have from 22 to 34% fewer cases of dreaded polio...