Word: panic
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Imagine this: In the middle of sex, your husband/boyfriend's condom breaks. Or your diaphragm gets dislodged. You spend the rest of the night in a state of panic; you know, somehow, that you're going to get pregnant, and you're not ready, financially or psychologically, to have a baby. So the next day you cancel your meetings and head to your doctor's office, where you wait hours for a cursory appointment - after which you're handed a prescription for the morning-after pill. At the local drugstore, the sole pharmacist on duty informs you that...
...then, around 1996, almost as quickly as the AIDS panic had materialized, it eased, and then slipped away. Around the world, AIDS-related deaths dropped by nearly 50 percent annually. The reemergence of other, less deadly STDs, like chlamydia and herpes, took over the pages of medical journals and newspapers, while advances in HIV and AIDS prevention were relegated to the back page summaries. Wealthy corporations and private donors, once dependable sources of AIDS research funding, began to ease off - a 1999 Gallup survey showed a 22 percent drop that year in the number of groups making donations...
...weird thing about the health panic rampaging across Europe is that it has almost nothing to do with the prevalence of the health risk itself. Only three people in continental Europe are known to have died from the human variant of bovine spongiform encephalopathy in the last decade. Despite the recent rise in the number of bovine cases, the chances of encountering a mad cow on the Continent are tiny: since 1990 the incidence of bse in cows in Europe is fewer than 2,000, compared to 180,000 in Britain. And yet across Europe, beef consumption has plunged...
...beginning to panic as well. Last week a U.S. Food and Drug Administration advisory panel recommended that anyone who had lived in France, Portugal or Ireland for a total of 10 years since 1980 be prohibited from donating blood (rules adopted last year excluded anyone who had lived in Britain for six months between 1980 and 1996). The American Red Cross, meanwhile, urged the FDA to apply the six-month rule to all of Western Europe--which would cut the supply of donors 5% or so--even though there's no evidence that the disease can be transmitted through blood...
...friend realized that she had disappeared into the bathroom, she became worried and began pounding on the door. The friend told police that she heard clothes rustling before the door swung open and the alleged victim bolted from the bathroom "with her eyes very big and a look of panic on her face." As she gathered her things to flee the party, the friend said, she broke into tears. When police arrested Chmura, one of his first remarks was directed at the girl: "How could you do this...