Word: bacillus
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Plague is caused by a bacillus, Pasteurella pestis, whose natural habitat is the rat. Fleas carry it from rats to humans. The disease, called bubonic when it affects the lymph nodes, pneumonic when it attacks the lungs, used to be 90% fatal; nowadays antibiotics and sulfa drugs can defeat it in 90% of cases, and widespread warfare against rats and fleas in underprivileged areas helps prevent outbreaks...
...Burma had the worst record with 198 cases; in the New World, Ecuador led with 72. In the U.S., where the bacillus has found a reservoir in wild rodents (TIME, July 9, 1956), there was one probable but unconfirmed case in Texas...
...perfect a TB vaccine, then the surprising success of France's late Dr. Albert Calmette, with Guérin collaborating, in attenuating a strain of tubercle bacilli taken from human patients by growing them in cattle. The trouble was that the vaccine, now universally known as BCG (for Bacillus of Calmette and Guérin), got a bad name early. The first enthusiasts made exaggerated claims for it, and in the late 1920s, virulent tubercle bacilli were accidentally substituted for BCG in Lübeck, Germany, and 72 children died...
Health Service physicians emphasized that chances of contracting the disease are a matter of "individual susceptibility," and that "a person who is run down or overtired would be more likely to be affected by the bacillus...
...most of the U.S. most of the time, typhoid is a "dead" disease. Nobody is in much danger of catching it, and doctors rarely look for it. But occasionally the typhoid bacillus (Salmonella typhosa), as if to keep its charter in the society of menaces, strikes back. This year a baffling outbreak has spread across three Midwestern states. It hit Minnesota most severely in January, Iowa in April. Wisconsin has had a gradual dose of it since the first of the year. To date there have been 121 cases (one death, in Iowa). The victims were from both urban...