Word: viruses
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Developed by Dr. Thomas Francis Jr. at the University of Michigan, the vaccine is made by growing influenza virus in fertile hens' eggs, then killing the virus. The dead virus, injected under the skin, creates protective antibodies. A single small injection (one cubic centimeter) usually gives a year's immunity against the two major types of flu, A and B. But it is strictly a preventive. Inoculation does not help after exposure to the disease...
...doctors promptly seized on a made-to-order opportunity to investigate, eventually traced the infection to a camp well into which cesspools drained. With the help of conscienious objectors, who volunteered to drink from the well, doctors established that the disease was caused by an invisible organism, probably a virus, in the water...
...virus is not easy to kill; it resists the usual treatment of water with chlorine. But Major James Baty, the Army's chief sanitary engineer, last week announced a successful method: superchlorination with 15 times the normal concentration of chlorine. To make the water fit to drink, it then has to be dechlorinated with a neutralizer, sodium sulphite...
...disease seems to strike hardest at the healthiest; because children with vitamin deficiencies seem to resist infection, doctors surmise that the polio virus does not thrive on undernourished body cells...
Tracking a Cure. Medical scientists think they have turned up some promising leads for polio cure. One of them: a vaccine made of polio virus inactivated by ultraviolet rays; it has been successful in immunizing laboratory mice, but is still to be tested on monkeys and human beings...