Word: polio
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Devastated by outbreaks of paralytic polio, the people of the Belgian Congo (now Zaire) had every reason to be thankful in 1957, when they became the first large group to receive an experimental polio vaccine. Ironically, the quest for deliverance from this ancient scourge may have made them unwitting participants in the birth of a new plague -- AIDS. That, at least, is the contention of a speculative but intriguing article in Rolling Stone...
...oral vaccine, developed by Dr. Hilary Koprowski of Philadelphia's Wistar Institute, was made from weakened polio viruses grown in a culture of monkey kidney cells. Several monkey viruses have been known to contaminate such cultures, though vaccine makers now take pains to weed them out. Extrapolating from a number of coincidences -- the testing of the vaccine in the very site where AIDS is thought to have begun; Koprowski's recollection that he cultured the virus in the tissue of green monkeys, a species that harbors a virus similar to HIV -- writer Tom Curtis hypothesizes that the vaccine was contaminated...
Coles's field work began while he was a resident in pediatrics and child psychology during the last polio epidemic, before the development of the Salk vaccine. "It was then that I really got interested in what happens to children under stress," he says. "I was stunned by the moral reflection that I heard from these kids because a lot of them were facing paralysis and even death...
...glory of America. In the decades following World War II, U.S. science reigned supreme, earning the envy of the world with one stunning triumph after another. Fostered by the largesse of a government swayed by Vannevar Bush's paean to science, it harnessed the power of the atom, conquered polio and discovered the earth's radiation belt. It created the laser, the transistor, the microchip and the electronic computer, broke the genetic code and conjured up the miracle of recombinant DNA technology. It described the fundamental nature of matter, solved the mystery of the quasars and designed the robot craft...
...precarious balancing act: they must maintain a healthy level of fear in people and yet keep them from slipping into either complacency or terror. That job is especially difficult in these days of the AIDS plague, which has become the most frightening and confusing health problem since the polio panic of the 1950s. While some Americans have smugly assumed they are perfectly safe, others have mistakenly fretted that they could pick up HIV (the AIDS virus) from toilet seats or mosquito bites. Throughout the crisis, specialists have offered strong reassurance: if people are careful about sex and avoid shooting drugs...