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Medicine Facts

Smallpox, Chickenpox . . . Monkeypox?

This past summer a few people in the midwest came down with monkeypox, a viral disease related to smallpox but less infectious and a lot less deadly to humans. Oddly they all seem to have caught the ... Continue reading

The Placebo Effect

To test new drugs, researchers usually divide their subjects into two groups. One group receives the experimental drug. The other receives a placebo or 'sugar pill' that should have no effect on the ... Continue reading

Which of these pills is the real thing?

SARS: Mother Nature Strikes Again!

SARS, short for Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, is big news this spring. By the middle of April 2003, over 2000 people had been diagnosed with it in China and Hong Kong, another few hundred in the ... Continue reading

It's Hay Fever Season!

If spring's flying pollen is making you sneeze, you are not alone. Some 40 to 50 million people in the United States complain of respiratory allergies, and experts estimate that three to four million ... Continue reading

Pollen grains magnified under the microscope.