How many cases make an epidemic? Survivors of the great polio plagues of the 1940s and '50s will never believe that in the U.S. the average toll in those years was "only" 1 victim out of every 5,000 people. Was that really all it took to scare the nation out of its wits, sending families scurrying in all directions--to the mountains, to the desert, to Europe--in vain hope of sanctuary. Perhaps polio's other name, infantile paralysis, had something to ...

Are you currently wearing a flag pin? Yes? Then you love America. No? Hmm. That's gonna be a problem. Such was the false dichotomy that faced Barack Obama during his April 16 debate against Hillary Clinton, when Charlie Gibson asked Obama a voter question about why he did not wear a flag pin on his lapel. The previous October, an Iowa ABC reporter had asked him a similar question, to which Obama replied that he ...

They are miniscule, measuring at most 2 mm to 3 mm long, yet few things induce more panic or fear among parents than head lice. But while an infestation of head lice on a child can be uncomfortable, the critters do not pose enough of a contagious hazard to justify the strict policies that many schools use to keep infected children out of class, according to a new report from the American Academy of Pediatrics . In the ...

ITEM: At a dinner party in New York's Westchester County, the dessert includes grapes. The hostess notices that her fellow suburbanites fall to with gusto; the guests from Manhattan unanimously abstain. ITEM: At St. Paul's, a fashionable New Hampshire prep school, grapes are the only part of the meal invariably left untouched. ITEM: In San Francisco, a Safeway official observes: "We have customers who come to the store for no other reason than to buy grapes. They'll load ...

Under an azure Patagonia sky, a few dozen conservation-minded citizens and their children took part in a puppet show recently in the town square of Cochrane, a tiny hamlet in southern Chile nestled between ancient forests and winding rivers. In the story, a purple otter sought guidance from the mystical forest spirit about the malevolent plans of a gravelly-voiced developer who wants to dam the river, a scheme that would disfigure the landscape and, with it, the ...

IT was a year of visitations and bold ventures with Russia and China, of a uniquely personal triumph at the polls for the President, of hopes raised and lately dashed for peace in Viet Nam. Foreign policy reigned preeminent, and was in good part the base for the landslide election victory at home. And U.S. foreign policy, for good or ill, was undeniably the handiwork of two people: Richard Milhous Nixon and Henry Alfred Kissinger, the President's Assistant for National ...

Stepping up the attackSometimes it seems that success fathers its own problems. In its campaign to hook smuggled drugs, the Reagan Administration has claimed some impressive catches: since establishing a regional interdiction center in South Florida in March 1982, it says that cocaine and marijuana seizures there are up 54% and 23% respectively, drug arrests have risen by 27%, and the street value of intercepted dope amounts to around $5 billion. Smugglers, however, have risen to the challenge by trafficking in smaller, harder-to-detect loads and by moving ...

The sentence in the courtroom that day in June 1964 was life in prison. The verdict of history will hardly judge Nelson Mandela a common criminal. Despite the government's determination to lock him away for good and crush his liberation movement, the unrelenting crusade to abolish apartheid that he waged from a prison cell over the decades made him the supreme symbol of the black struggle in South Africa. At 4:15 p.m. local time on Sunday, Feb. 11, Nelson Mandela ...

It is 1975 and Khmer Rouge troops are forcibly evacuating Phnom Penh's residents to the countrysidean exodus that will ultimately lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands. Monitoring events from Beijing, an elderly Mao Zedong asks visiting Vietnamese leader Le Duan whether he could ever mount such a merciless purge. Le Duan shakes his head. "No," marvels Mao. "We couldn't do it either." Two Asian strongmen, dazzled by the moves of the new despot on the block: it's a bizarre ...

The good news: it is important for the young to stay lean, but a little heft helps people live longer, according to a federal researcher at the Gerontology Research Center in Baltimore. The bad news: many obesity and cardiovascular specialists say that lifelong leanness is still the desirable goal. Guidelines on girth have been the subject of a growing dispute since 1983, when the Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. updated its charts on desirable weight. The poundage associated with the lowest ...