Word: ailments
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...school and I smelled something," she said, "and then I felt something pressing on my chest." At that point she passed out and was taken to the hospital, along with 250 other schoolchildren from the area. Her ailment: a mysterious malady that in the past four weeks has afflicted as many as 900 West Bank Palestinians, the majority of them young women. It all started at a girls' school in the West Bank village of Arrabe when pupils began to complain of the same symptoms: headaches, abdominal pains, dizziness, energy loss. The ailment spread to eight schools in Jenin...
...last week many Israeli doctors were convinced that whatever the original "environmental irritant" might have been, the West Bank ailment had become what some described as a "mass phenomenon." A Palestinian health official agreed, concluding that while the first 20% of the cases were probably caused by the inhalation of some kind of gas, the remaining 80% were basically psychosomatic. As Director-General Modan put it, "We don't want to call it hysteria for fear we will create hysteria." A more fundamental problem is that even if the epidemic really was a case of mass hysteria, few Palestinian...
Medical research is still sketchy. The commonest cocaine-related ailment, a breakdown of nasal membrane, "is the least of one's worries," according to Dr. Pollin of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Chronic cocaine use kills the appetite and so regularly results in severe weight loss. In a three-year study, Gerald Rosen, a Duke University pharmacologist, has found that metabolized cocaine destroys dangerous numbers of liver cells. Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital, among other places, have seen evidence of serious lung damage in free-basers...
Rumors began to spread that the new man in the Kremlin had been hospitalized. Some Westerners suggested that Andropov was suffering from nephritis, a chronic kidney ailment. Others hinted of heart trouble and possibly the flu, a common illness this time of year in Moscow. There was of course no official confirmation that Andropov had been either ill or in the hospital. Stories that he might be suffering from some life-threatening malady were quickly scotched when Andropov reappeared last Friday at a meeting with Nicaraguan Leader Daniel Ortega, and when he gave Pravda an interview that vigorously criticized President...
...known as AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome); 228 others have already succumbed. First fully described in 1980, the disease destroys the immune system, leaving its victims prey to all manner of viruses and bacteria. Cancer, particularly KS, is a major threat, as is pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, a singularly lethal ailment. The survival rate after two years of AIDS: less than 20%. Last week, at New York University Medical Center in Manhattan, 300 doctors gathered to exchange notes on the phenomenon. The bad news: "We are at the horizon of a new epidemic, rather than at the peak," says Dr. James...