Word: sulfa
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...that suffering, new ideas had been born, from the technologies of radar, sulfa drugs, jet aircraft and nuclear energy to the concepts of collective security, the Atlantic alliance and the United Nations. New horrors, almost beyond description, now had to be given names: fire storm, radiation, holocaust. But other terms suggested rays of hope: jeep, airlift and the symbol of three dots and a dash: V for victory...
Today the pampered pigs travel first-class in their own custom trailer, equipped with fans over each pen and a system that changes the air inside every two minutes. Their 100-gal. on-board water supply is laced with sulfa powder and penicillin to ward off scours, the dread hog diarrhea. Each year the company holds a contest among employees to name the racers. Samples from this year's roster: Hamtastic, Leaping Loin, Chop Sooee, Boared Stiff, Charlie Choplin...
...that era's technology seems crude now, science was then, at least in some areas, in a similar state. Learned astronomers argued vociferously over whether our galaxy, the Milky Way, was alone or only one of many islands of stars. In medicine, the first sulfa drugs were unheard of. Physicists, having recently discovered that gravity could warp space and time, were now catching glimpses of an even wilder idea: that at its fundamental level, of atomic particles, the universe was governed entirely by chance. There was not a hint of the powerful forces these ideas would eventually unleash...
...sufferers (many of them dying), the good news came none too soon. Penicillin (sometimes rhymes with villain, sometimes with whistle in) is the best treatment for all staphylococcic infections, all hemolytic streptococcic infections, pneumococcic infections (of the lining of skull, spinal cord, lung and heart surfaces), pneumococcic pneumonia that sulfa drugs will not cure, all gonococcic infections (including all gonorrhea that sulfa drugs will not cure). Diseases against which penicillin is effective but not fully tested: syphilis, actinomycosis, bacterial endocarditis...