Word: burkitt
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Leder says that studies done may years ago on concer known as Burkitt's lymphoma paved the way for his transgenic research...
...Epstein-Barr virus, a member of the herpes family that is carried by an estimated 90% of American adults. Researchers speculate that stress, an immune-system deficiency or even environmental toxins could activate EBV, which is known to cause most cases of infectious mononucleosis and has been linked to Burkitt's lymphoma...
Confronting their doctors, the victims asked if they might have Burkitt's lymphoma, caught from their visiting aunt. A typical reaction, says the Georgian, was " 'Don't you ever say anything like that. If you came into my office and said that cancer is contagious, it would empty out.' " In desperation, a family member called Dr. Seymour Grufferman, a cancer epidemiologist at Duke University Medical Center, explained the contagion idea and sent him biopsy slides of the victims' tumors...
Grufferman too was skeptical -- until examination of the slides showed that one patient indeed had Burkitt's lymphoma. With Dr. Joseph Pagano, a cancer virologist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, he promptly launched an investigation. Soon, Pagano recalls, "we realized that a virus was a more likely explanation than any other...
...Third World. "Someone infected with hepatitis B has 100 times the normal risk of developing liver cancer," says Beasley, "and that's being conservative." The Epstein-Barr virus has been associated with a couple of types of cancer. In Central Africa and New Guinea, it has been linked to Burkitt's lymphoma, an immune-cell cancer that primarily strikes children. In southern China, the virus plays a role in nasopharyngeal carcinoma, a malignancy of the nose and throat that afflicts more than 50,000 people a year. Retroviruses are known to cause cancer in a wide range of animals, from...