Word: viruses
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...starters, the word hepatitis simply means inflammation of the liver. There's an alphabet soup of viruses that cause the inflammation, and treatment depends on which virus is to blame. Three viruses--A, B and C--cause most of the problems...
...doesn't take an exotic virus like Ebola to transform the U.S. into a hot zone. A single case of smallpox could put the entire nation at risk. The smallpox virus is highly contagious and would spread quickly because Americans are not vaccinated. Routine inoculations were halted in 1972. People vaccinated before 1972 lost most of their immunity within 10 years...
...terrorist who wanted to launch a smallpox attack, however, would probably have a very hard time getting hold of the virus. Smallpox was eradicated in 1980. Officially, only two stores of the virus exist, for research purposes, in secure locations in the U.S. and Russia. There may be covert stashes in Iraq, North Korea and Russia, but these countries would be reluctant to release them, fearing a smallpox epidemic among their own unvaccinated people. Even if a terrorist were successful in obtaining the virus, his plans could backfire: smallpox is so contagious that the first victims are likely...
Please pass this on to as many people as possible. The Klingerman virus, the Muslim day of terror, Nostradamus' prophecy, the poisoned water supply, the 4,000 Jews who stayed home on Sept. 11 and the 70-year-old man who surfed the debris down 80 flights to safety--all of these are fiction. They were made up, misheard or misconstrued--sometimes out of malice, sometimes not--and circulated with haste across the world's e-mail servers in an attempt to make sense of, or assign blame for, the World Trade Center disaster...
...ride to safety is a classic wish-fulfillment rumor, as is the story that Osama bin Laden is dying of liver cancer. Bogey rumors (derived from the bogeyman) are based on fear. Poisoned reservoirs, anthrax attacks, the visage of Satan in the World Trade Center smoke and the Klingerman virus (which supposedly arrives through the mail on a sponge in a blue envelope marked "A Gift for You from the Klingerman Foundation") all play on our fear of the worst, which, to some people, is more comforting than the unknown. Wedge-driving rumors--Jews or Arabs had prior knowledge, Arab...