Word: bacterias
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...Institut Médical Evangélique report that this chance discovery has paid off. The researchers report that a single nine-banded armadillo that died recently at Gulf yielded some 300 trillion leprosy bacilli-good news for medical researchers who have been searching for ways to cultivate the bacteria for laboratory studies. Doctors will also be able to use the infected tissue to make a diagnostic reagent called lepromin, which is used to predict the severity of a leprosy patient's disease. The single New Iberia animal has yielded enough of the chemical to perform 15 million tests...
Although the spiral bacteria, or spirochetes, that cause syphilis were identified in 1905 and have been stained and photographed thousands of times since, they have defied all the efforts of microbiologists to grow them in the test tube. Man is the only natural host of the microbes, called Treponema pallidum, but some animals, notably rabbits and monkeys, can be infected with them. Why then have they proved so resistant to cultivation in glassware...
...Massachusetts researchers suggest that the answer lies in a simple mistake made back in 1905: when early researchers noted that the syphilis bacteria die on exposure to air, they assumed that the microbes were anaerobic, meaning that they could not live in the presence of oxygen...
...Charles D. Cox, at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, this seemed paradoxical because spirochetes infecting humans or animals flourish in oxygen-rich blood and cells. With Technician Miriam K. Barber he began experimenting with a virulent strain of syphilis bacteria grown in rabbits. Using a recently developed, extremely sensitive technique for measuring oxygen concentrations, the two investigators found that the spirochetes, far from being anaerobic, consume oxygen in their metabolism. In the journal Infection and Immunity they suggest the "strong possibility" that oxygen is necessary for the reproduction and growth of the organisms. As to why they...
Although meningitis can result from infection by any of several different viruses and bacteria, the most virulent form is caused by the meningococcus, Neisseria meningitidis. This comes in four different breeds known as types A, B, C and D, only one of which is usually implicated in an epidemic. But Brazilian microbiologists believe that types A and C are rampaging simultaneously in the current outbreak, and doctors favor administering vaccines against both in a single inoculation...