Word: viruses
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...home care for AIDS patients and a streamlined federal approval process to speed up the delivery of experimental AIDS drugs. In the latest document, Watkins went further and emphasized two measures that the Reagan Administration has stiffly opposed: new federal antidiscrimination laws to protect those infected with the AIDS virus from loss of jobs, insurance and housing, and new confidentiality statutes to ensure accurate testing for and reporting of the disease. The draft report, which must be approved by the full commission before it goes to the President, is already being hailed by health professionals and AIDS activists...
...sexual contacts for notification," he said, "if they feel they will lose their jobs and homes based on an HIV-positive test." The chairman's recommendation: that the President issue an Executive Order extending federal antidiscrimination laws already on the books to include those infected with the AIDS virus. In Congress, conservative lawmakers, who vigorously oppose steps that would confer special rights on homosexuals, the group most directly affected by AIDS, promptly voiced their objections...
...smallpox. He inoculated James Phipps, 8, with cowpox, then exposed him to smallpox six weeks later. The boy never came down with the disease, confirming that the immunization had worked. More than a century and a half passed before scientists knew the reason: the antigens on the cowpox virus are so similar to those on the smallpox virus that they can prime the immune system to repel a smallpox infection...
Even without provocation by the AIDS virus or other infectious organisms, the immune system can sometimes go awry. Often, entirely on its own, it can overrespond, fail to respond or turn against the body it is designed to protect with the same lethal fury it directs against invaders and cancerous cells. Some 80 immune-system deficiencies have been identified so far. About one in 400 people has at least one immune-system component missing or malfunctioning, usually for genetic reasons. In one in 10,000 people, the deficiency leads to serious disorders. Perhaps the most tragic example is severe combined...
...doctors have been trying to rally the weakened immune systems of cancer patients to fight the disease. Only recently, however, have therapies been developed that bring some of the body's own most potent weapons to bear in the struggle to repel invaders ranging from cancer to the AIDS virus. Those weapons include antibodies, tumor-killing blood cells and the chemical messengers that regulate them...