Medicine: Virus in the Liver

Doctors used to think they could relax about hepatitis after the end of a major war. "Infectious jaundice" (as it was commonly called from its most obvious symptom) was regarded as a disease of wartime camps with poor sanitation; peacetime outbreaks were relatively few and usually limited to overcrowded institutions such as orphanages, mental hospitals and prisons. Today, inflammation of the liver as a result of invasion by a virus is becoming a major health problem in the workaday, peacetime U.S.

No less than 33,382 cases were reported to the Public Health Service in...

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