Word: rubella
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Long Unsuspected. For virtually every human being outside the womb, rubella is a trivial complaint. It usually causes a mild fever, a fleeting rash, a slight headache, occasionally a cough and a sore throat. Some cases are so mild that they pass unnoticed, yet all apparently confer lifelong immunity. Unlike mumps and common measles, rubella seldom evokes severe ill ness in the 20% of people who escape it in childhood and catch it as adults...
...Rubella's cause and effect were long unsuspected. Not until 1941 did an Australian ophthalmologist, Sir Norman McAlister Gregg (1892-1966), discover that an unusual number of his infant patients, born with cataracts, had been conceived during a 1940 rubella epidemic...
Doctors then began to recognize many other birth defects resulting from maternal rubella, including abnormalities in the heart, limb deformities, deafness and mental retardation. Such damage occurs in about 50% of fetuses whose mothers had rubella during their first six months of pregnancy...
...Rubella flourishes among youngsters who are crowded together in kindergartens and the lower grades of school...
...beginning of the end for rubella came in 1961, when two groups of investigators, one headed by Dr. Thomas Weller at Harvard, the other led by Dr. Paul D. Parkman at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, isolated the virus and devised ways of cultivating it in the laboratory. Parkman and a fellow pediatrician, Dr. Harry M. Meyer Jr., subsequently teamed up to attenuate or "tame" the virus so that, in a vaccine, it would cause no disease but would still trigger the making of antibodies and thereby produce immunity. Their strain, which was dubbed...