Word: polio
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...height of his powers, when he was stricken with polio and became a paraplegic. He had been an athlete, a man who had loved to swim and sail, to play tennis and golf, to run in the woods and ride horseback in the fields. Determined to overcome his disability, he devoted seven years of his life to grueling physical therapy. In 1928, however, when he accepted the Democratic nomination for Governor of New York, he understood that victory would bring an end to his daily therapy, that he would never walk under his own power again. For the remainder...
Roosevelt knew in the marrow of his bones, from his own struggle with polio and his innate grasp of the American temper, that restoring optimism was the beginning of progress. "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself" was both the way he led his life and the way he led our nation...
...Hooper tries to answer in The River (Little, Brown), an exhaustive but quite readable tome that is part travelogue, part scientific inquiry, part investigative journalism. Hooper tries to establish what a panel of scientists convened in 1992 could not--that HIV spread from chimps to man in contaminated experimental polio vaccines that were tested in Africa. He comes close--very close--but falls short of the smoking-gun evidence that would put the issue to rest...
Hooper re-creates the early days of polio-vaccine research and weaves this narrative into the story of HIV's origins, which is pretty solid until it hits Africa. HIV can be traced back to bustling villages along the Congo River in the 1950s. From there, however, the story line frays into dozens of related but possibly unconnected threads. Hooper picks up several of these, including, tantalizingly, the fact that the earliest recorded AIDS cases coincide almost perfectly with a map of the polio-vaccine testing sites. But there is no evidence that cells from African chimps were used...
...need to know because we need to know: A new book hypothesizing that AIDS originated in a polio vaccine may reflect our discomfort with being unable to control our environment more than it provides any scientific breakthrough. British journalist Michael Hooper's "The River" amasses a wealth of circumstantial evidence supporting the theory that the HIV virus made the jump from animals to humans via an experimental batch of polio vaccine manufactured in part from chimpanzee tissue that may have been infected. "This theory is partially testable, because there are still some stocks of the oral polio vaccine in question...