Word: virus
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...notion that mosquitoes bite snakes made most scientists laugh. But not the University of Utah's imaginative Microbiologist Louis P. Gebhardt Jr. By following up a hunch, Gebhardt has just climaxed an eight-year effort to trace the life cycle of a virus that causes one form of deadly brain inflammation commonly known as sleeping sickness...
Drowsy Victim. Dr. Gebhardt knew that in the summertime, usually beginning in July, at least one species of mosquito carries the WEE virus from infected animal to man or from infected man to man. He also knew that some birds, notably swallows, harbor the virus. But in the Rockies and on the high plains the carrier mosquitoes die off as winter begins and insect-eating birds fly south. Where did the virus spend the winter...
...Gebhardt had good reason to suspect snakes. The Culex tarsalis mosquito, principal carrier of the WEE virus, hatches out in swamps. Early in the spring, when birds are still scarce, the female mosquito lights on the nearest creature for the blood meal she needs before she can lay her eggs. Dr. Gebhardt figured that the victim might be a snake just emerging drowsily from hibernation. Starting in 1961, he hiked miles through swamps and caught plenty of garter, gopher and blue racer snakes, but found virus in only...
When he decided to test the snakes' blood immediately after capture, Gebhardt got startling results: 37 out of 84 of the relatively small, nonvenomous and supposedly harmless snakes harbored the virus, but only in the early spring and, inexplicably, in the fall. Blood samples taken in the summer have proved negative. In late spring and summer, the mosquitoes feed largely on birds, especially helpless nestlings...
...lucky coincidence, that search ended when five-year-old Jeryl Lynn Hilleman came down with mumps. Jeryl Lynn is the daughter of Dr. Maurice R. Hilleman, head of the virology team at Merck Sharp & Dohme Institute for Therapeutic Research, which had been hunting for years for a mumps virus that would grow well in the lab and lose its virulence, while still retaining its power to give immunity. Dr. Hilleman and Dr. Eugene Buynak found that Jeryl Lynn's virus was just what they wanted...