Word: rubella
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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...
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...
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...