Word: virus
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Most people associate viral hepatitis, a debilitating and potentially fatal liver disease, with polluted water, contaminated shellfish or unsterilized hypodermic needles. But there is another way that the water-borne hepatitis viruses can find their way into humans: by mosquito. Researchers from the New Jersey Medical School and the Veterans Administration Hospital in East Orange, N.J., report in the A.M.A. Journal that they became suspicious after studying an epidemic of hepatitis that hit New Jersey in 1955. None of the victims was a drug addict, and none had eaten shellfish or come into contact with known hepatitis carriers...
...instruments. A team of disease detectives headed by Dr. Carl J. Johnson investigated, fearing that ear piercing - like tattooing and mainlining heroin - might spread hepatitis. The jeweler said that he soaked his needles in 70% alcohol, but Johnson pointed out that this treatment does not kill the stubborn hepatitis virus. The team tracked down 48 young women who had had hitherto unexplained viral hepatitis and found that seven had recently had their ears pierced. Not only jewelers but physicians who use only alcohol or benzal-konium solution for "cold sterilization" may be guilty of spreading the disease. Johnson insists that...
...Such diseases would result from a reshuffling of genes and not from new genetic material like the virus from outer space in Michael Crichton's 1969 novel (later a movie), The Andromeda Strain...
...disease has always been wreathed in mystery. For centuries nothing was known of its causes, though it was noted that in many cases it followed an attack of encephalitis, inflammation of the brain. Then, from 1916 to 1926, there came a worldwide epidemic of brain inflammation, caused by a virus and named encephalitis lethargica because the most severely stricken victims spent days or weeks almost comatose and immobile. Some of these patients soon developed full-blown cases of Parkinsonism, marked by alternations of involuntary movements and rigidity, a fixed gaze and a shuffling gait. Even after this encephalitis virus disappeared...
...Bottles. The two physicians evolved a hypothesis: except for a few rare cases caused by chemical poisoning, the great epidemic of Parkinsonism resulted from something that happened long ago and then ceased. What was that something? Poskanzer has an idea: a mild, probably unrecognized infection with the virus of encephalitis lethargica back in the 1920s could have damaged certain brain cells; later, as the brain's chemistry was impaired with advancing age, the signs of Parkinson's began to appear...