Word: verruga
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...horror that haunts this valley is a disease called verruga (literal translation: warts). It is transmitted by an almost invisible sandfly (Phlebotomus verrucarum), smaller than a mosquito, which bites only at night. Penetrating the finest netting and seams in clothing, the insect infects its victim with a parasite (Bartonella bacilliformis) that destroys red blood cells, produces a high fever and often kills within a few days...
Scientists first heard of verruga in 1870, during the building of the Central Railway, when 7,000 workers died before the rails had been pushed out of the valley. The first investigator of the disease was a medical student named Daniel A. Carrión, now a Peruvian national hero, who died after inoculating himself with serum from a patient's wart. Verruga is still something of a medical mystery. Nobody has ever found out how the sandfly acquires its parasite, where it lays its eggs, why it seems to have thrived only in one narrow area. Doctors have...
Last week a verruga expert, Dr. T. S. Battistini of the Peruvian Hygienic Institute, thought he had a promising lead: the sandfly is extremely vulnerable to DDT. When the rainy season ends in June, Peru will launch an intensive DDT attack in a test area. It will be none too soon; verruga, long unknown outside of Peru, seems to be spreading. Since 1939 outbreaks have been reported in Colombia and Ecuador...
...Santa Valley Corp., pressed on with South America's most exciting hydroelectric development. Even with abnormally high wages (78? a day), it was still difficult to keep the 1,300 Indian laborers steadily on the job. Some part of each year, in spite of the deadly verruga flies and the bone-dry soil of the western Andean slopes, they had to go back to tend their meager mountain farms...
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