Word: spreading
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Asking questions. Hunting for clues. Testing theories. Hitting blind alleys. Asking more questions. The assault on the mystery of AIDS is a prime example of how disease detection works. The foundation has been laid by epidemiologists who have carefully analyzed the spread of the disease. So far, 75.9% of the victims in the U.S. have been active homosexual men, 16% intravenous drug users, 5% immigrants from Haiti, and 1% hemophiliacs. Only 96 victims so far are not known to be members of one of these risk groups. More than 90% of the victims are males between the ages...
...disease. The fear has become irrational." Explains Dr. James Curran, head of the AIDS task force at Atlanta's Centers for Disease Control (CDC): "For a person not in a known risk group, the risk is not only minimal but likely to remain minimal. It apparently is not spread through routine contact or through respiration, like the flu." Indeed, none of the hundreds of health-care workers who have treated patients have been infected by AIDS...
...struggle to conquer such epidemics, and the fear they spread, is the work of a special breed. They are spiritual descendants of Dr. John Snow (1813-58), who tracked the incidence of cholera during the London epidemic of 1831 and stemmed further devastation by shutting down one of the city's water pumps. In the past few decades, his followers have significantly improved the quality of life. In much of the world they have virtually eliminated the threat of such onetime plagues as polio, smallpox, cholera and diphtheria...
...months he was virtually isolated from his superiors, talking weekly on a short-wave radio to a CDC doctor in Hawaii to report progress and get advice. He and the health officials on Truk discovered that cholera, previously thought to be transmitted only in water, apparently was also being spread by infected people handling food in the victims' homes. Says Holmberg: "Knowing it is a food-borne disease may make quite a difference in how we handle future outbreaks...
Tanner, a lawyer turned private investigator in San Francisco, has come back home to settle the future of the family farm with his nonfarming siblings. The 320-acre spread is coveted by a clutch of corporations, and the family is divided on whether to sell. The only kinsman making real money from the acreage is Tanner's nephew Billy, raising bumper crops of marijuana on the back 40. An embittered Viet Nam veteran and victim of dioxin burns, Billy has succeeded in exposing several of Chaldea's leading villains. When he is found hanging from a tree, town...