Word: viral
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...Surgeon Denis P. Burkitt, 53, who first described its prevalence and unusual distribution, it attacks children regardless of race, in high-rainfall, equatorial areas of low altitude. The geography of the disease is strikingly similar to that of yellow fever. And yellow fever has long been recognized as a viral infection carried by a mosquito...
There were as many dissents as there were theories, and since so few drugs cure viral infections, the very fact that potent anti-cancer drugs such as amethopterin (Methotrexate) and cyclophosphamide (Cytoxan) have cured massive cases of Burkitt's supermalignant tumor might seem to argue against a viral cause. But doctors now believe that what the drugs do is cure or relieve a viral-induced cancer, after the virus itself may have vanished. Thus they may give the body an opportunity to develop its own mechanisms to fight the cancer...
...celled organisms, such as bacteria, because they have a single chromosome (whereas man has 46). As stand-ins for genes he chose viruses that infect bacteria (bacterio-phages), because their cores consist of nucleic acid. What actually happens Lwoff found, is not as simple as had been thought. The viral nucleic acid, in effect masquerading as a gene, might do one of two things after invading a bacterium: 1) stimulate the bacterial cell to produce hundreds of copies of the virus particle, and destroy itself in the process, as happens in many ordinary human viral infections, or 2) attach itself...
...corner and classify that their very name is vague-PPLO (for pleuropneumonia-like organisms). But these days that name keeps popping up in lab reports from all over the world.* The baffling microbes have already been indicted for complicity in causing diseases ranging from puerperal (childbed) fever to the "viral pneumonia" that afflicts so many recruits in boot camps. Now they are even being suspected as a possible cause of cancer...
...Conant convinced was George Packer Berry (A.B., Princeton, '21; M.D., Johns Hopkins, '25) who had almost as much experience as a patient as he had as a physician. A microbiologist, Berry had suffered a miserable, lingering attack of psittacosis ("parrot fever") and another of hepatitis while studying viral infections...