Word: smallpox
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...18th century. Until then, couples relied on recipes−marjoram, "thyme, parsley, the juice of the herb savin−that did little good. A study of aristocratic women suggests that 45% died before 50, one-quarter of those in childbirth. If perpetual pregnancy did not do a woman in, smallpox well might. Life expectancy was 35. If a 17th century woman should survive to old age, she was in danger of being taken for a witch. In a 1648 treatise, John Stearne explained witchcraft as a woman's game on the ground that females are more "revengeful" than...
...were on their way out. Malaria, exulted the World Health Organization in Geneva, was defeated in Europe, banished from Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) and on the run in India and Pakistan, thanks to the effectiveness of drugs and insecticides. Even in Africa, it stood to go the way of smallpox. They could not have been more wrong. Today more than half the world's people live under the threat of malaria. By some estimates, 250 million-more than the population of the U.S.- fall ill each year; a million die in Africa alone. Says Dr. Adetokunbo Lucas, director...
...much work remains to be done. An experimental vaccine for all three stages may be only a decade away, according to Pathologist Sydney Cohen of Guy's Hospital medical school in London. "If it is very effective," he says, "malaria eventually will be eradicated like smallpox...
...City's illness all work on and worsen one another. But the one problem that underlies all the others is the extraordinary growth in population. The Aztec capital known as Tenochtitlán, with its lakes and flower gardens (and an efficient sewage system), was depopulated by a smallpox epidemic in 1520, which killed more than 80% of all the Indians who survived the Spanish invasion. Mexico City did not reach the 2 million mark until after World War II. But then a systematic national policy of urban industrialization helped send the figures soaring: to 5 million...
...alter the genetic material, or DNA, of cowpox virus by inserting a gene from another virus-herpes, hepatitis B or influenza (see diagram). The goal of these microscopic manipulations is to develop a vaccine that will fool the immune system and make it swing into action. A smallpox preventive that expresses a herpes trait, for instance, will provoke the body into creating antibodies against herpes. The person is then protectively armed against an actual attack of the disease...