Word: rubella
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...what would seem to be an unlikely place-the hollow of an infant's hand. Certain abnormalities in palm lines and fingerprint patterns can alert pediatric cardiologists to the existence of inborn heart defects, including those that develop in the womb, perhaps from a maternal infection such as rubella. Other aberrant patterns may indicate to specialists in the science of dermatoglyphics (literally, "skin carvings") the presence of Down's syndrome (mongolism) and other chromosomal disorders. Now, researchers have discovered that some unusual palm lines signal the possibility of childhood leukemia...
...womb. The more conspicuous "flexion creases" (the palmist's "heart, head and life lines") are formed a month or two earlier. In normal palms, the heart and head lines are separate and distinct, and neither extends clear across the palm. In many victims of mongolism and of prenatal rubella, however, they are replaced by a single "simian crease," like that on a monkey's palm. At the Children's Medical Research Foundation in Sydney, Australia, Dr. Margaret A. Menser and S. G. Purvis-Smith found another abnormality. In this, an extended head line becomes a simianlike crease...
...leukemic children had either a simian or a Sydney line in one or both palms, as against only 13% of the normals. Victims of genetically determined mongolism are notoriously susceptible to leukemia. Oddly, identical patterns appear in the palms of the mongoloid children and in those of rubella-damaged babies. The reason, according to the Australian researchers, may be that some fetuses are genetically predisposed either to leukemia, or to suffer unusually severe damage from a maternal viral infection. Such damage, they suggest, may manifest itself a few years later as leukemia...
Most researchers seek to conquer viral infections by vaccination, and their record has been impressive. A dozen major diseases caused by viruses have virtually succumbed to vaccines, including smallpox, yellow fever, polio and measles; rubella may be next (TIME, June 20). Some investigators, on the other hand, believe that drugs, not vaccines, will eventually conquer many other viral afflictions. Yet when the drug proponents met last week at a Manhattan symposium sponsored by the New York Academy of Sciences, they were dispirited and disaffected. The vaccinators, complained Co-Chairman Ernest C. Herrmann Jr. of the Mayo Clinic, have hogged...
They also developed a relatively simple blood test to show whether an individual has already had rubella and does not need the vaccine because he is immune...