Word: viruses
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Feel a mosquito biting at your leg? Be careful: it might be America's new pest, the Asian tiger. First discovered in the U.S. nine months ago in Houston, the mosquito can transmit dangerous viral infections, including dengue fever and the La Crosse virus. The tiger has since been found in three states besides Texas: Louisiana, Mississippi and Tennessee...
When the first international conference on AIDS met in Atlanta 14 months ago, an air of optimism prevailed. In a remarkably short time, scientists had not only identified the virus responsible for the disease but devised a blood test that could determine if a person had ever been infected. Would a vaccine come next? The atmosphere at the second annual AIDS congress, held last week at the cavernous Palais des Congres in Paris, was considerably more subdued. Although the world's leading AIDS experts were among the more than 2,500 doctors and scientists in attendance, they bore few encouraging...
...present trends continue, predicted James Curran, director of the AIDS program at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, there will be 300,000 cases of AIDS worldwide in 1991. Representatives of the World Health Organization estimated that 5 million to 10 million people now harbor the AIDS virus. Most of them do not show symptoms of the disease, but all are capable of transmitting the virus to others...
Nowhere is AIDS more widespread than in Africa, where WHO estimates that 50,000 people already suffer from the disease and that at least 1 million more are infected with the virus. Said Bila Kapita, an AIDS expert from Kinshasa, Zaire: "Today we know that AIDS is almost everywhere in Africa, especially central Africa. The question is, Why does Africa seem to be such a hot spot?" No answer was forthcoming. In Africa, AIDS strikes men and women in nearly equal numbers and, Kapita said, seems to be primarily spread by heterosexual contact...
Essex's lab is also working to develop a more sensitive AIDS screening test. The test currently in use screens the blood for antibodies to the AIDS virus. That procedure presents certain difficulties; there is a lag time "between infection and the presence of antibodies of two to three months, but the individual still has the virus," Essex says. "We need to look for earlier markers...