Word: viruses
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...professor of tropical medicine at Columbia, reported his findings late last month, Lassa fever had already proved so deadly that one of the world's most expert virologists had fallen ill of the disease, a lab assistant and two nurses had died of it, and research with the virus had been abandoned until more exacting safety precautions could be devised...
Patient's Plague. In his Yale laboratory, Dr. Casals was busy with the three nurses' blood serums. Using extreme precautions and working with two other expert virologists, he cultured a virus from the serums and injected it into mice. The adult mice died. Then in June, Casals fell ill. His first symptoms did not suggest what Frame had now christened Lassa fever. But at Presbyterian Hospital this diagnosis was confirmed. What to do? No known treatment was effective, but Patient Casals was more fortunate than his predecessors. Nurse Pinneo was convalescing, and there should still be antibodies...
...Yale lab technician, Juan Roman, was less fortunate. He had not worked directly with the Lassa serums or infected mice, so when he visited relatives in York, Pa., over Thanksgiving and fell ill, no one suspected the mystery virus. Roman died. Later, when his serum revealed that he had somehow been infected with the dread fever...
...sure whether Lassa virus belongs to Casals' favorite group of arboviruses. It is related, he suggests, to a virus that causes a devastating Bolivian hemorrhagic fever (TIME, July 19, 1963). Whatever its nature, it may be widespread in sub-Saharan Africa, but relatively unknown to authorities because natives die of it in the bush without seeking medical...
Where does the virus live, and how is it transmitted? No one knows, but Frame's serum collection offered a clue. It contained a Lassa-positive specimen from Carrie Moore, who had a similar illness in Guinea, 1,500 miles west of Lassa, when she worked there as a teacher in 1965. Although Mrs. Moore recovered, her fever left her stone-deaf. Her quarters, she recalls, were infested with mice that left their droppings all over her room and the kitchen. Nurse Pinneo also remembers mice droppings in the mission hospital at Jos. If mice are indeed carriers...