Word: bacterias
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However well the devices work, they are not always trouble-free. Within the past decade, the incidence of pelvic infections, usually caused by bacteria, has reached epidemic proportions among women, and studies indicate that users of I.U.D.s seem from two to seven times more susceptible to such problems than women who do not employ them. This is a special concern for those who have never been pregnant. The warning signals include abdominal pain, fever, severe menstrual cramps, abnormal bleeding and vaginal discharges. Left unchecked, such infections can scar and block the fallopian tubes, where the union of egg and sperm...
...precise role of the I.U.D. in pelvic infections still puzzles doctors. One theory is that bacteria are able to ascend into the uterus via the threads that are attached to I.U.D.s to let women check on their proper position and make their removal easier. Another possibility: the I.U.D. somehow makes the uterus more hospitable, biochemically speaking, to invading bacteria. By contrast, birth control pills seem to have the opposite effect, suppressing infection...
...after it struck at an American Legion convention in Philadelphia in 1976. Now, it turns out, the bacterium Legionella pneumophila is even tricker than anyone suspected. Researchers Marcus Horwitz and Samuel Silverstein of Manhattan's Rockefeller University have found that it belongs to a select group of bacteria that evade the body's immune system by turning it to their own advantage. Like the microbes that cause tuberculosis and leprosy, the bug is what scientists dub an intracellular pathogen. It invades white blood cells called monocytes, which normally kill bacteria, and uses material within these cells to propagate...
...plant at its research facilities in Britain. Abbott Laboratories, Warner-Lambert, Merck & Co., and a number of other companies are also gearing up for interferon production. When Biogen S.A., a Swiss firm specializing in the new recombinant DNA (gene splicing) techniques, announced in January that it had induced bacteria to produce a facsimile of human interferon, the stock of Schering-Plough, a part owner of Biogen, rose almost eight points, to 37?. Says one prominent cancer researcher: "The drug companies know that there is a gold mine in interferon. They are scrambling like mad to produce...
...implications were staggering. Here at last, it seemed, was an agent that would mow down a broad spectrum of viruses, just as penicillin does with bacteria. Most laymen remained unaware of the discovery, but one notable exception was Dan Barry, artist of the Flash Gordon comic strip. That became evident when the first clinical use of interferon took place not in a hospital but in a 1960 Flash Gordon adventure. In that episode, spacemen infected with an extraterrestrial virus aboard a rocket ship far from home are pulled back from death's door by last-minute injections of interferon...