Word: rubella
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...Another bug-this one viral-made the hours before liftoff almost as tense as the launch itself. The countdown for the mission was about to begin when Astronaut Charles Duke, of the Apollo 13 back-up crew, complained of chills, fever and a rash. Doctors diagnosed his illness as rubella, or German measles. Duke had apparently caught the disease from the children of friends. Dismayed NASA officials immediately ordered blood tests of Apollo 13's first-line crew members, who had come in contact with Duke during several preflight conferences. Both Astronauts Jim Lovell and Fred Haise were found...
...until the next practical launch date, May 9, the extra cost would be $800,000 and there might also be some deterioration of the Saturn systems. In contrast, there was the possibility of replacing Mattingly with his back-up crewman, John Swigert, who was found to have immunity against rubella. But Swigert had trained only with the back-up crew and there was doubt that he could properly coordinate with Lovell and Haise on such short notice. Said Astronaut Chief "Deke" Slayton: "It was sort of like trying to put Glenn Miller into Tommy Dorsey's band. Both...
...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...