Word: bacterias
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Noon. As the gruel is doled out, cooks keep the six vats brewing, boiling dense brown river water to purge at least some of the bacteria, then stirring in the Unimix with wooden poles. One cook estimates that it will take 80 vats to feed everyone here this day. At least, he says, there is enough food. Two weeks before, inadequate supplies stirred the crowd into a frenzy. Mothers tore pots from starving children to feed their own. "It was terrible," recalls Dr. Ayub Sheik Yeron, the UNICEF representative who set up this feeding center last month. "When people have...
...onto a specific molecule on its cell wall, a change in that molecule could make it impossible for the antibiotic to stick to its target. It's something like the protect-the-perimete r strategy used by defenders of ramparts on medieval fortresses. In other cases, says Neu, the bacteria develop enzymes capable of destroying the antibiotics and even molecular pumps that expel the drugs from the cell. The most recent example of bacterial resourcefulness came to light only two weeks ago. By deleting a single gene, an English-French research team announced, certain strains of the TB germ have...
Once a bacterium has a protective combination of genes, they are duplicated every time the bacterium reproduces itself. Moreover, the microbe can pass its genetic shield to a different strain of bacteria through a process called conjugation, the bacterial equivalent of sex. In addition to exchanging DNA in the form of chromosomes, conjugating bacteria can swap smaller snippets of DNA called plasmids. Like viruses, plasmids make exceedingly effective shuttles for carrying drug-resistant traits from one bacterium to another...
...infections in some extremely ill patients with massive doses of antibiotics, and when one drug didn't work, they tried another and another. From the standpoint of their individual patients, the physicians could do no better. The consequences for society as a whole, however, are troubling. Stubborn strains of bacteria resistant to many different antibiotics have taken up permanent residence in hospitals around the world. Experts predict that the effectiveness of widely active antibiotic agents such as the cephalosporins, which entered clinical use in 1964, will soon be dramatically reduced...
...reason bacteria acquire resistance to several antibiotics is that many drugs are derivative of one another. For example, when bacteria developed an enzyme to chew up penicillin, drug designers retaliated with larger antibiotic molecules that did not fit into the site that serves as that enzyme's "mouth." In short order, says Dr. Mitchell Cohen, an epidemiologist at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, "the bacteria responded to the challenge by developing an enzyme with a bigger mouth...