Word: rubella
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...five students had not eaten the same food except on the night of the big lecture, Kean is confident that they picked up their parasites from the snack bar's hamburgers. For them, as for most victims, the illness was uncomfortable and not disabling. But Toxoplasma is like rubella in one respect: it wreaks its worst havoc on the unborn child, causing encephalitis, hydrocephalus, heart damage and hepatitis. Says Kean: "If this epidemic had occurred in five pregnant women, the potential danger to their unborn children-either fetal death or severe brain damage-would have been enormous...
...epidemic of rubella, or German measles, was a national disaster. Rubella virus is as deadly as thalidomide for the unborn, and the epidemic left an estimated 30,000 babies marred for life by cataracts, deafness, heart malformations or mental retardation. Ever since, virologists have been racing against time, trying to perfect and test an effective rubella vaccine that can be marketed soon enough to avert the next predictable epidemic, expected in early 1970. Last week it appeared certain that the U.S. would have at least three different vaccines in time...
...third live vaccine, an injectable one produced in Belgium and grown in rabbit-kidney cells, is being extensively tested by Smith Kline & French Laboratories. Because of its head start in Europe, this may be the world's first licensed rubella vaccine. Additional U.S. testing will probably take a year...
Although the purpose of vaccination against German, or "three-day," measles is to protect pregnant women for the sake of the unborn, the plan is not to vaccinate women.* Instead, public health officials hope to stamp out rubella by vaccinating children; thus, as they put it, "drying up the reservoir" of susceptible subjects who spread the infection. Some time in their lives, most adults have had a touch of rubella with no ill effects, and are now immune...
...last epidemic created a widespread demand for legalization of therapeutic abortion in cases where a woman has had rubella in the first three months of pregnancy...