Word: viruses
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...conditions might have been ripe for an outbreak in the ship's nursery. But Army investigators reported that, despite the clearance at Le Havre, some of the babies were suffering from malnutrition when they were brought aboard ship. Said the investigators: "The outbreak . . . was due to a filterable virus and spread through contact infection...
...Washington, the Commission on Neurotropic Virus Diseases reported that Army doctors first isolated the virus in Hawaii, developed the new vaccine in the U.S. from an extract taken from the brains of mice infected with the virus. An immunizing dose is extremely small: extract from the brain of a single mouse supplies 10,000 doses...
...Chick & the Egg. What Ernest Goodpasture has done is to devise a means of propagating large quantities of pure virus-the poison (uncontaminated by bacteria) which produces disease. Scientists had never been able to get enough pure virus for their experiments because viruses, unlike bacteria, demand live tissue; they will not multiply in artificial culture media...
...clue to Goodpasture's revolutionary discovery came from research on a common barnyard disease, fowlpox, which farmers know as "sore head." With an associate, Dr. Alice Miles Woodruff, he hit on the idea of cultivating fowlpox virus in a fertile egg. It was cheaper than the rats, guinea pigs and monkeys which scientists had used previously; it was a sterile medium enclosed in a naturally sterile container. After purchasing an incubator from a mail-order house and a few dozen fertile eggs from a Nashville hatchery, Dr. Goodpasture set to work...
With a dentist's drill, he cut out a piece of the shell, inoculated the thin membrane inside with infectious material, sat back to study the results through a tiny "window" of melted paraffin and cover glass. The fowlpox virus throve. Subsequent tests with smallpox vaccine showed that one egg would produce enough to protect 1,000 children for life. Word of the new technique spread throughout the scientific world...