Word: virus
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Live-polio-virus vaccines, in wide use outside the U.S., are still not really safe for general use as a public-health measure, says Baylor University's Dr. Joseph Melnick after a study of such vaccines. Melnick told the fifth Congress of Biological Standardization in Jerusalem that, while there have been relatively few cases of paralytic polio among those vaccinated with live-virus vaccines, some of the virus strains, after they pass through the human body, become more virulent. It is possible that contact with virus-infected excrement could spread polio to unvaccinated persons. His recommendation: until the stability...
Surprisingly, it was in the Chinese Medical Journal (which prints a lot of unscientific Communist quackery) that major progress was reported. T'ang Fei-Fan and colleagues in Peking described scrupulously conducted experiments in which they grew generations of the virus in fertilized eggs, gave it to monkeys, which got something like trachoma...
Also surprisingly, it was the conservative British who then took the radical step of giving the disease to a human volunteer. Dr. Leslie H. Collier and colleagues began with trachoma virus from the West African colony of Gambia. It proved almost identical with the Chinese strain and could also be grown in eggs. At London's Institute of Ophthalmology the researchers found their man: an old-age pensioner, 71, who had had both eyes removed because of injury and infection (not trachoma). Into his empty eye sockets the researchers inoculated their egg-grown trachoma virus. He had considerable discomfort...
Drugs are useless against most true viruses. , But the cause of trachoma is a large virus, like that of psittacosis;-ten times bigger than the virus of polio. The large viruses can be knocked out by some sulfa drugs and antibiotics-already widely used in pilot campaigns against trachoma. And the British researchers hope to make a preventive vaccine...
While the city fathers fiddled, the virus spread. Kansas City had 109 cases of polio (nearly half of them paralytic) by week's end, with no sign that the epidemic was abating...