Word: bacterias
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...gastrointestinal tract, heart valve and blood, are now resistant to vancomycin, for many years the antibiotic of last resort. Even more worrisome, insensitivity to vancomycin--which nurses and physicians in intensive-care units refer to as the big gun--is showing up in the dangerous family of staphylococcus bacteria...
Modern medicine has engaged disease-causing microbes in an escalating arms race, so that as soon as drug developers launch a new weapon--an antibiotic, for example--their microbial foes respond by shoring up their own defenses. Sometimes bacteria and parasites undergo random mutations that spontaneously confer resistance. More frequently, they acquire survival-enhancing characteristics in the process of exchanging DNA with other microbes that have already developed resistance...
...Bacteria and parasites do not do this on purpose, of course, but the effect is much the same. In 1944, for example, penicillin appeared to be a magic bullet against staphylococcal infections. The problem was, it failed to kill every single bug, and those that survived the onslaught slowly began to multiply. The result: by the 1950s most staph infections had become highly resistant to penicillin. The same fate met penicillin's successors, erythromycin and methicillin; now it appears to be vancomycin's turn...
...penicillin. For decades, it has been prescribed by many physicians for every sniffle and sneeze, even when the source of the problem was a virus. Antibiotics have been recklessly prescribed for ear and even sinus infections, many of which, as Mayo Clinic researchers recently noted, are not due to bacteria at all but to the immune system's response to fungal infections...
CHOPSTICKS, PLEASE It may make your eyes tear, but wasabi, that fiery green stuff served with sushi, could be good for your teeth. Japanese researchers find that an ingredient in the Asian horseradish (no, it's not mustard) seems to inhibit the growth of bacteria linked to cavities. If raw fish doesn't hold much appeal, the cavity-fighting compounds, called isothiocyanates, are also present in cabbage...