Word: viral
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Sitting on an examining table at the Children's Hospital in Pittsburgh, three-year-old Shawntea West is smiling and alert, apparently in excellent health. But she is afflicted with the most common of the serious childhood diseases. The mumps? Viral meningitis? Measles? Whooping cough? The answer, says Dr. Herbert Needleman as he draws blood from her arm, is lead poisoning...
...take long to track down the source of the infection. Laboratory tests revealed that it is a strain of morbilli, the same type of virus -- similar to the cause of canine distemper and human measles -- that killed some 20,000 North Sea seals in 1988. While viral epidemics are part of the natural ecology of the sea, some scientists think this outbreak was aggravated by man-made pollution. Autopsies on the mammals show their tissues are contaminated with metals and the toxic polychlorinated biphenyls (PCPs). The chemicals may have weakened the dolphins' immune systems, making the animals more vulnerable...
...benefit than a bane. In the case of cotton, which is heavily sprayed with chemical insecticides, the addition of a bacterial gene that poisons budworms and bollworms could help farmers and the environment alike. Similarly, the discovery that plants can be "vaccinated" against disease by equipping them with viral genes ought to reduce reliance on chemical insecticides. Currently, farmers battle such diseases by spraying the insects that carry them. Genetic engineering could also be used to give livestock more resistance to bacteria, reducing the need to feed antibiotics to farm animals...
...there is no guarantee that gene therapy will be effective against any of these illnesses. Some genes are too big to fit inside the viral taxi. And things could go wrong. The new genes might not "turn on" inside the body, or they might get misplaced in the gene sequence and rather than fight cancers, start triggering them instead. Ultimately, the only way to see what happens is with carefully designed experiments. As Dr. Anderson puts it, "Now we can find out if gene therapy is really going to work...
...victims, or from their relatives or doctors, has launched a $1 million "surveillance program" in which 350 physicians will study CFS patients in Reno, Atlanta, Grand Rapids and Wichita. "We're sort of starting from ground zero with this illness," says Walter Gunn of the CDC's viral diseases division...