Word: bacterias
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...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...
Before the coming of penicillin and other antibiotics, bacterial diseases simply ran their courses. Either the immune system fought them off and the patient survived or the battle was lost. But antibiotics changed the contest radically: they selectively killed bacteria without harming the body's cells. For the first time, potentially lethal infections could be stopped before they got a foothold...
Unfortunately, as Columbia University's Dr. Harold Neu observed in the journal Science, "bacteria are cleverer than men." Just as they have adapted to nearly every environmental niche on the planet, they have now begun adjusting to a world laced with antibiotics. It didn't take long. Just a year or two after penicillin went into widespread use, the first resistant strain of staph appeared. As other antibiotics came along, microbes found ways to resist them as well, through changes in genetic makeup. In some cases, for example, the bacteria gained the ability to manufacture an enzyme that destroys...