Word: bacterias
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Next to Koch. The biggest news last week came from Buffalo, where three tuberculosis societies held a joint convention.* Bacteriologist Rene Jules Dubos of the Rockefeller Institute had at last discovered a method of cultivating TB bacteria, simply and quickly, in test tubes. The basis of Dubos' method is a synthetic detergent made by Atlas Powder Co. (which calls it "Tween 80") for use in cosmetics. Doctors hailed the discovery as the greatest contribution to TB research since Robert Koch first isolated the germ itself...
...some eight servings for every U.S. soldier in Japan and Korea) of fresh vegetables a week by next spring. Reason for the project: Japanese soil has been heavily fertilized with night soil for centuries; vegetables grown in such farmland are fresh but may harbor disease-producing bacteria like the typhoid bacillus...
While germs are usually specialists, attacking only a limited number of species, some form of biological warfare might be only too practicable. Chances are that pestilence-spreaders would not use old, familiar diseases, but would create new ones by modifying standard bacteria or viruses. With modern knowledge of genetics and biochemistry, this should not be impossible. Human beings would have little natural resistance against such synthetic diseases, which might conceivably spread, in a biological chain reaction, through the world's entire population. Perhaps suitable diseases have already been created in several countries, their organisms kept alive in secret, guarded...
...severe case of diarrhea is an acute medical emergency. It can be caused by insanitary bottles, dirty hands, or unsterilized milk; since milk is a good culture medium, bacteria multiply rapidly and the baby's intestines are not capable of combating them successfully. The baby loses large quantities of salts and water. This severe dehydration may result in death...
...Chick & the Egg. What Ernest Goodpasture has done is to devise a means of propagating large quantities of pure virus-the poison (uncontaminated by bacteria) which produces disease. Scientists had never been able to get enough pure virus for their experiments because viruses, unlike bacteria, demand live tissue; they will not multiply in artificial culture media...