Word: virologist
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Last week Dutch Virologist Albert Osterhaus announced he had located the cause: the same virus that produces distemper in dogs. Osterhaus believes the seals contracted the virus after contact with canines and spread it to one another by coughing. Pollution may also have contributed by lowering the animals' immunological defenses...
Between 5% and 15% of those with persistent warts are expected to develop cancer, says Virologist Wayne Lancaster of Georgetown University. The most common by far is cancer of the cervix, but HPV has also been blamed for tumors of the vulva, vagina, anus and penis. The virus alone, however, probably does not cause cancer. Instead, say researchers, one or more of several co-factors seem to be required to trigger the disease. Among the suspected culprits: smoking, birth-control pills, and the presence of herpes and other venereal infections...
...Neal Steigbigel, chief of infectious disease at Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx, thinks male-to-female transmission is bound to occur more often simply because of the mechanics of vaginal intercourse. Harvard Virologist Martin Hirsch, however, notes that herpes and syphilis appear to travel equally well in either direction between the sexes. Hirsch thinks the only reason more women have contracted the AIDS virus from men than the other way around is that many more men now have the disease. As more women become carriers, he suspects, they will infect their partners. "There is no doubt," says Dr. Margaret Fischl...
...affliction, Elvin-Lewis and Witte, then both at Washington University, froze samples of Robert R.'s blood, brain and other organs. Last June, four years after the AIDS virus was first isolated, Witte sent some of the frozen samples to Tulane University, where they were definitively analyzed by Virologist Robert Garry. "There's no question that the tissue was positive for AIDS," Garry states. In fact, Robert R.'s blood reacted to all nine markers used in the highly sensitive Western blot test for AIDS antibodies. Why didn't the researchers have the samples tested earlier? "We waited until...
Medical researchers remain puzzled by the syndrome. Says Epidemiologist Jonathan Kaplan of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta, who investigated the 1985 Lake Tahoe outbreak: "We don't know what causes it, and we have a hard time diagnosing it." Still, notes Stephen Straus, a virologist at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), who has interviewed sufferers, "you have to start believing what they're describing...