Word: bacterias
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...confident of winning the battle. Not only have many diseases caused by viruses, such as AIDS, proved to be extraordinarily difficult to cure, but even old, easily treated bacterial ailments do not always respond to drugs as they once did. Using marvelous powers of mutation, some strains of bacteria are transforming themselves into new breeds of superbugs that are invulnerable to some or all antibiotics...
...most publicized superbugs are the strains of drug-resistant tuberculosis bacteria that have caused outbreaks of the disease in U.S. hospitals and prisons over the past few years. And in a sobering series of articles in the current Science magazine, researchers point out that the problem of drug resistance is not limited to a few germs but spans an entire spectrum of disease-causing microbes, including those responsible for gonorrhea, meningitis, streptococcal pneumonia and staphylococcus infections. "Bacteria are cleverer than men," says Dr. Harold Neu of Columbia University's medical school...
Antibiotic-proof bacteria are spreading around the globe because of the enormous increase in tourism and business travel in recent decades. Last month a woman came to a New York City emergency room with a strain of cholera picked up in Ecuador that was impervious to a variety of antibiotics. Penicillin- resistant strains of gonorrhea, originally noted in Africa around 1976, have cropped up in the Philippines, Thailand and the Washington Heights section of New York City. Public health officials are particularly concerned about potentially fatal forms of dysentery in Central and South America that are resistant to half...
Quite possibly the earth's most ancient life-forms, bacteria are experts at the game of survival. Throw a bunch of them onto an ice floe or into the steaming heart of Old Faithful, and one or another of the unicellular beasties will probably turn out to possess a critical trait that enables it to live through the ordeal and pass that trait on to trillions of descendants, a rapid example of evolution through natural selection. Just as predation by lions has gradually increased the swiftness of gazelles, the use of antibiotics has spurred the emergence of bacteria that...
...flying mosquitoes as seals are from buzzards. Not much water is needed: a tablespoon in an old beer can or tire casing is enough to provide a home for 200 of these little air-breathing water worms, but the more water the better. The larvae zip around, feeding on bacteria and bits of vegetation, which they filter through bristles in their mouths. In some species they also eat one another or the larvae of other mosquitoes, a habit the folks at the Mosquito Unit would like to encourage...