Word: sand
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...Hong Kong leader Tung Chee-hwa, meanwhile, drew a line in the sand for speculators, vowing the Hong Kong dollar's 14-year peg to the U.S. dollar is rock solid. He noted that the territory has US$88 billion in foreign reserves to defend its currency...
...cause of this destruction was kala-azar (scientifically known as visceral leishmaniasis), a deadly disease caused by a parasitic protozoan. The disease is transmitted by the bite of a sand fly that is about one-tenth of an inch long and is ubiquitous in certain woodlands. Once inside the body, the kala-azar protozoan invades and weakens the immune system, causing fever, weight loss, anemia and enlargement of the spleen. If the disease is untreated, a secondary infection, such as pneumonia or malaria, usually brings painful death...
...soon became apparent that the carrier was the female Phlebotomus orientalis sand fly, which passes the deadly protozoan to humans in an unusual manner (see box). The tiny insect, which cannot fly very high or far, inhabits the vast, red acacia forests, where it bites its victims in order to get protein-rich blood to develop its eggs. When female sand flies bit people driven by war or famine into the forests from areas where kala-azar was already endemic, the flies picked up the disease themselves, ready to be passed...
...that came with the pills mentioned some side effects: weight gain, dry mouth, sluggishness. It also informed me that it might take weeks for the drug to relieve my symptoms. I filled a glass of water and downed my pills, and within an hour, my mouth was dry as sand. Because all this happened seven years ago, before depression and its chemical basis were staple topics on the morning shows, I went to bed that night feeling slightly ashamed...
...near miss ? and pointed out Mir had about 1,000 yards of headroom. "It wasn't anything major. This happens every month," said NASA spokesman John Lawrence. But the incident provided a reminder of the hazards of space traffic ? where an object the size of a grain of sand can hit with the impact of a .38-caliber bullet...