As I write this, a dear friend is lying in an intensive care unit in Washington, D.C. What started as a bad summer cold quickly turned into pneumonia, and after a few harrowing days she had to be put on a ventilator, while her doctors filled her IV line with a cocktail of antibiotics until lab tests could tell them what kind of infection she had. Sixty years ago, patients with such severe pneumonia either got better on their own, or died. There was no such thing as an ICU. Mechanical ventilators only became standard equipment in hospitals in the 1970s. Faster and more accurate diagnostic tests and more drugs for treating pneumonia came on line after the AIDS epidemic led to a crash research effort.
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