Word: viruses
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Cripples and Criminals. Encephalitis is a convenient name for a class of diseases which attack the grey and white matter of the brain. What causes infection is a mystery, although doctors suspect a filterable virus. In the U.S. two forms of encephalitis have been discovered: 1) equine encephalitis, a horse disease, which may be transmitted to human beings by mosquitoes; 2) St. Louis encephalitis, named after the epidemics which raged in St. Louis in 1933 and again in 1937. Although they first appeared together, flu has no direct connection with encephalitis; it may, of course, weaken resistance to the nerve...
...possibility of a bigger influenza epidemic than the U.S. has had in 20 years was forecast by public health doctors at a meeting in Atlantic City. Reasons: 1) the nation has been steadily losing the partial immunity it got from the flu scourges of World War I; 2) the virus that caused mild regional epidemics last year has probably been growing in strength; 3) once more hordes of men are crowded in Army camps...
...many cities health officers warned parents to put their children to bed if they showed the slightest symptoms of colds, stiff necks or bellyaches. For the polio virus seems to spread through the nervous system when children take strenuous exercise...
...West it is carried by the wood tick (Dermacentor andersoni), in the East by the dog tick (Dermacentor variabilis). But only one in 500 ticks is infected. The ticks, which are brown, about three-sixteenths of an inch long, with eight spiny legs, carry within their bodies a virus of the family Rickettsia (named after Howard Taylor Ricketts, one of the martyred scientists). Another form of Rickettsia is the virus of typhus fever. A tick passes on the virus through a bite; the virus also may penetrate the skin if a tick is crushed between the fingers...
Spraying school children's noses to block off the virus of infantile paralysis is a popular preventive. It is also futile, says Dr. Albert Bruce Sabin of Cincinnati. The virus does not get in through the nose, but through the mouth...