Word: bacterias
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There is no basis for the statement that tubercle bacilli growing on the classical media are so modified as to "make experiments inconclusive": for all we know it may be the bacteria growing in our own unorthodox media which are modified...
...Bacteria multiply so fast that they can pack into a few hours or days the equivalent of thousands of generations of the higher forms of life. As the walrus has adapted itself to the Arctic and the cactus to the desert, the bacteria seem to adapt themselves quickly when exposed to the initially hostile environment created by the new drugs. In the last few months, bacteriologists have bred strains of pneumococci, streptococci and other common germs which are practically immune to the sulfa drugs, penicillin...
...Jumps Ahead. In clinical experience, too, doctors have been meeting drug-resistant infections which they attribute to new mutations among the bacteria. Gonorrheal infections now often do not respond as readily to the sulfa drugs as they did a few years ago. Penicillin is still effective against the disease; but the British Medical Journal, reviewing recent research, warns "against the idea that penicillin will necessarily continue indefinitely to cure nearly every case...
Though bacterial "drug-fastness" is a serious problem for medical researchers, Dr. Molitor believes there is yet no cause for public anxiety. Bacteria do not always keep up their resistance. Some bacteria, as they become drug-resistant, also become less virulent; and new antibiotics are being discovered all the time. The adaptable researchers hope to keep two jumps ahead of the jump-ahead germs...
...bumbled for lack of an effective technique, can now "do an experiment a day instead of two a year," according to Dr. Dubos. They can also diagnose new TB cases, where X rays are useless, in a few days instead of two months. Previous methods of cultivating the bacteria were not only slow but they usually modified the organism so as to make the experiments inconclusive...