Word: polio
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...newest and most hopeful weapons in the fight against polio is a blood fraction called gamma globulin. Doctors have known for several years that it is a rich storehouse of disease-fighting antibodies. They also know that injections of it will reduce the effects of measles in children. Now there is evidence that gamma globulin may be able to attack and destroy polio before it gets to the nervous system and wreaks its paralyzing effects...
...last week, two researchers described the experiments that give doctors their new hope. Working independently at Johns Hopkins and Yale, Dr. David Bodian and Dr. Dorothy M. Horstmann had conducted almost identical tests and reached the same conclusion: there is a step missing in the widely held theory that polio passes directly from the alimentary tract to nerve fibers and thus to the nervous system. Drs. Bodian and Horstmann think there is a transient middle phase: that the virus goes from the digestive system to the blood stream, and from there, if not destroyed by antibodies, to the nervous system...
Chimps & Antibodies. Dr. Bodian began to suspect the old theory two years ago while analyzing a series of gamma globulin samples from human blood. He found that 80 to 90% of it contained antibodies that would attack and kill live polio virus. Such antibodies, he reasoned, could only come from a blood stream which had carried polio virus in the past...
...Bodian tested out his theory on the lab's chimpanzees and monkeys. A few days after he fed them live polio virus, he found traces of it in their stools. Within 8 to 15 days, the virus showed up in their blood streams. Playing and chattering happily, the monkeys showed no signs of polio during this period. But after a few more days the familiar symptoms appeared and paralysis began to set in. At Yale, Dr. Horstmann got similar results...
...sense, her husband's election to the presidency was a triumph for her-after his attack of polio his mother had done everything in her power to keep poor Franklin at home by her side in a wheelchair for the rest of his life. But Usher Ike Hoover recalled Eleanor Roosevelt's first day in the White House-he discovered her hard at work tugging furniture into new positions, as if by that housewife's gesture she could make a home out of the halls in which Lincoln had lived and a million tourists had wandered...