Word: bacterias
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...notorious flare-up in Gloucestershire, England, of what the press dubbed flesh-eating bacteria alerted people to the dangers of streptococcus-A infections. The common bacteria that cause strep throat generally produce no lasting harm if properly treated, but certain virulent strains can turn lethal. Strep-A infections claim thousands of lives each year in the U.S. and Europe alone...
...virus that no one had known about and no one knew how to fight was a sobering experience -- especially when drugs proved powerless to stop the virus and efforts to develop a vaccine proved extraordinarily difficult. Faced with AIDS, and with an ever increasing number of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, doctors were forced to admit that the medical profession was actually retreating in the battle against germs...
...AIDS were not enough to worry about, there was a rise in other sexually transmitted infections, including herpes, syphilis and gonorrhea. People heard about the victims who died in the Northwest from eating undercooked Jack in the Box hamburgers tainted with a hazardous strain of E. coli bacteria. They were told to cook their chicken thoroughly to avoid food poisoning from salmonella bacteria. And last year they saw how the rare hantavirus, once unknown in the U.S., emerged from mice to kill 30 people in as many as 20 states...
...anxiety about disease. It's getting harder to enjoy a meal, make love or even take a walk in the woods without a bit of fear in the back of the mind. No wonder people pay an unreasonable amount of attention when tabloids trumpet headlines about "flesh-eating bacteria." And no wonder Stephen King's The Stand, a TV mini-series based on his novel about a "superflu" that ravages the world's population, earned some of the year's highest ratings...
Plasmodium, a protozoan responsible for malaria, flourishes in the human body, growing inside red blood cells until the cells burst. And without enough red cells to carry oxygen through the body, humans become anemic and can die from renal failure or convulsions. Bacteria, which are considerably smaller than protozoans, generally do their damage indirectly, producing toxins that stimulate the body to mount an immune response. Ideally the immune cells kill the bacteria. But if the bacteria get out of control, their poisons can either kill cells or generate a huge immune reaction that is itself toxic...