Word: virality
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Unlike other viral diseases transmitted by insects, birds or mammals, smallpox is spread by man himself. Its sole "vector" is a person actually afflicted with the disease; he is contagious only during the four weeks between the appearance of the disfiguring rash and the scaling off of the ugly scabs that form on its pustules. If all those who come in contact with the victim during that period have already been vaccinated or are immune from previous infection, the human transmission chain is broken and the disease is not passed...
...from a victim last month, Dr. Sheila Moriber Katz, a pathologist at Philadelphia's Hahnemann Medical College and Hospital, became seriously ill with symptoms that looked strikingly like those of Legionnaires' Disease: muscle pain, shaking chills and high fever. Katz's illness was clinically diagnosed as viral pneumonia, and she recovered in time to attend last week's meeting. But try as they might, doctors have been unable to identify the virus that felled her-if it was indeed a virus...
Initially, some doctors thought the ailment was a form of Lassa fever, a highly lethal and still untreatable viral disease, usually transmitted by rodents, which was first discovered in a Nigerian town in 1969. Now the mystery has been solved. In Geneva last week, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced that scientists at Atlanta's CDC, Antwerp's Institute for Tropical Medicine and Britain's Microbiological Research Establishment had all identified the killer as a form of Marburg virus disease, an extremely rare ailment first spotted in 1967 among lab workers in Marburg, West Germany, handling organs...
Blumberg, 51, of Philadelphia's Institute for Cancer Research, identified a blood-carried viral particle, "Australia antigen," associated with a debilitating liver disease, hepatitis B. His biomedical detective work, involving an aborigine's blood, not only led to a method of testing potential blood donors for hepatitis but also paved the way for an experimental antihepatitis vaccine...
...antibodies to bird-carried viruses. The results were negative. CDC tests found no indication of either plague or typhoid fever. So the search went on into more exotic terrain. Tests also ruled out tularemia (rabbit fever), a deadly tropical disease known as Lassa fever, and Marburg disease, a viral disease from Africa. Further screening seemed to dismiss fungi as a suspect; no fungus is known to produce the fatally fulminating pneumonia typical of Legion disease...