Word: virus
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...began a global inoculation campaign in 1967. Brazil, the Western Hemisphere's last reservoir of the disease, has not reported a case since last April. Once the remaining trouble spots in Asia and Africa have been cleansed, smallpox should be dead. No animal is known to harbor the virus (although monkeys can be infected with it), and every confirmed case in modern times has been traced to human contact...
...reporting the new development this week used guarded language. Further tests are scheduled to confirm the find, details of which are scheduled for publication in the British journal Nature. Still, Drs. Robert McAllister and Murray Gardner are willing to say: "We're almost certain that this is the virus we're after...
...experiments picked up last spring when a solution made from the malignant cells was injected into unborn kittens. Four of the animals, all from different mothers, developed tumors. In effect, the cancers created were almost entirely of human cellular composition. One of the tumors was shedding C-type virus particles, similar to those known to cause cancer in animals, at a prodigious rate...
Despite these results, the researchers remained skeptical of their own evidence. "We thought it was just a feline leukemia virus," explained McAllister. But further experiments showed that the virus was chemically different from all previously identified mammalian viruses. Gardner still feels a "small nagging doubt-the remote possibility that it's a strange new type of cat virus." To rule out this possibility, the researchers plan an additional series of laboratory experiments, including attempts to produce viral antiserum from guinea pigs and rabbits. The antiserum could then be used in human cancer tissue to test for the presence...
Earlier Detection. Viruses and virus-like particles have also been found in other forms of human cancer-in the breast, cervix and lymphatic system, for instance. But scientists thus far have been unable to determine whether any of these particles could cause cancer; this is what sets the new find apart from earlier ones and makes scientists hopeful of further progress. "If this proves to be a true human virus," says Dr. Robert Huebner of the National Cancer Institute's viral carcinogenesis branch, "it will mean that we're light-years ahead of where we've been...