COMEBACK DISEASES

Enlarge Image Image Gallery Laughter may not be the best medicine, but research shows that watching Duck soup may be better than eathing Mom's chicken soup.

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TO YOUR HEALTH

These "defeated' ills have lost a battle but not yet the war.

A new additive is said to prevent cholesterol's absorption by the body.

When it concerns the fitness of body, mind or spirit, the editors of American Health are there, staying on top of up-to-date medical research, separating fad from fact and helping you preserve and improve life's most precious gift—your good health. A major story in a recent issue involves diseases once thought defeated in this country that are rearing their ugly heads again.

Comeback Diseases

Infectious diseases such as cholera, rheumatic fever and plague—though quite rare—are still threats to be reckoned with. For example, cholera, Vibrio comma , is turning up in the shellfish population, mainly on the U.S. Gulf Coast. It's usually transmitted to humans when they eat shellfish that have been undercooked or improperly stored. Likewise, outbreaks of such maladies of yesteryear as measles, mumps, diphtheria, tuberculosis and syphilis are on the rise. That's partly because parents, doctors and public health authorities have failed to mount the effort needed to make sure everyone susceptible to preventable diseases, regardless of economic status, is vaccinated. In fact, immunization levels for preschoolers actually worsened or showed no improvement between 1980 and 1985 (the latest years for which data are available).

Even people who have been properly immunized are being stricken. In the majority of recent cases of measles, the administered vaccine apparently never took hold. However, a rise in cases of whooping cough may not be the result of a failure of a vaccine but, perhaps, failure of the immunity to last as people grow older. This might not matter as much if more infants were immunized and there wasn't so much whooping cough around to pose a risk. Diphtheria, too, is striking people who've been immunized but whose immunity levels have fallen. Indeed, tomorrow's adults may find themselves as vulnerable as yesterday's children to this illness.

Sometimes a bygone infectious disease strikes again because it suddenly becomes more virulent, as is probably the case with the Group A streptococcus strains that can lead to rheumatic fever. What's more, organisms that "learn" certain adaptations (such as the ability to adhere more tightly to a human cell or to resist an antibiotic) can sometimes pass the traits to cousins through mobile pieces of DNA, called transposons. For example, Staphylococcus aureus , which causes toxic shock syndrome, appears to have passed on its toxin-producing know-how to streptococci. The result: "toxic strep syndrome."

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