Word: bacillus
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
American medicine has been able to compound all manner of miracles, ranging from the creation of powerful antibiotics that can dispatch a brash bacillus to the introduction of death-defying surgical procedures. Yet there is one illness that has baffled U.S. doctors: how to contain sharply rising medical costs, which have climbed from $42 billion to nearly $140 billion (almost twice the inflation rate) in a decade and now total more than the country spends on national defense. One reason for the soaring costs is more sophisticated care, but another is the "third party" problem -more than 90% of hospital...
...Pathogenesis. Only an incredibly small fraction of all bacterial species can cause disease. The rest play essential roles in the cycle of nature. Infectious bacteria differ from each other in several distinct respects: infectivity (i.e., the infectious does, ranging from a few cells of the tularemia bacillus to around 10-6 of the cholera vibrio); specific distribution in the body; virulence (i.e., the severity of the disease produced); and communicability from one individual host to another. These attributes depend on the coordinate activity of many genes, which are capable of independent variation. For our discussion the distinction between the ability...
...were reports, still unexplained, of outbreaks beginning aboard ships that had been at sea for three weeks or more. Four years of war had left much of the world ripe for all sorts of epidemics, and many varieties of pneumonia-causing bacteria were pullulating. So was Pfeiffer's bacillus, which had been mistakenly identified in 1892-93 as the cause of influenza and therefore named Hemophilus influenzae. There is no doubt that among the millions who fell prey to the virus, many were simultaneously attacked by this and other bacteria...
...plan is not practical; spruce and balsam are best adapted to the north woods and, says Fred Holt, director of Maine's bureau of forestry, "they always come back when you plant something else." Biological controls-most notably one that involves spraying the foliage with a solution containing Bacillus thuringiensus, a bacterium that kills only caterpillars-are still too expensive and difficult to apply over a wide area...
According to an early theory, the strain may have been caused when the mild Hog Flu virus, which sickened hogs but not humans, combined with a relatively harmless bacillus to produce a virulent man killer. But in 1918, 25 years before the electron microscope made it possible to see viruses at all, there was no way to discourage advances from the Spanish Lady. Paranoia often took the place of ineffective remedies. There were those who thought the bug was the Kaiser's secret weapon, despite the losses his own troops suffered. In Poland, the source of infection was said...