Word: bacterias
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...When bacteria are killed by carbolic acid or iodine, they stay dead; their tissues are destroyed by corrosive chemical action. But some modern soaps, though so bland that they are used for softening luxury fabrics, are a hundred times more toxic to bacteria than is carbolic acid...
...They took their catches in tight-woven bags to trucks outfitted as laboratories, parked in the shadows of mountains. They combed the rodents for fleas, then slit the carcasses to remove certain viscera and tissues. In many viscera the bacteriologists found what they feared would be there: the oval bacteria of Pasteurella pestis-the plague, the Black Death...
...unsolved mysteries of epidemiology." wrote the late Dr. Hans Zinsser of Harvard. For Europeans did not become plague-resistant: they still succumb readily enough when in such plague centers as India. Nor did they become notably more hygienic: the flea still flourishes in much of Europe. Perhaps the plague bacteria lost some of their virulence. But they may regain their virulence as they did in the 14th Century...
Agar-agar is a gelatinous protein, essential in hospital laboratories for the culture and identification of bacteria and the testing of serums and antitoxins. Hitherto imported from Japan, it is now produced from another seaweed, only twelve inches high, which grows on the rocky sea bottom along the coast of Southern California...
Dirty as they may be, said the Journal, "fresh wounds should be visualized as containing relatively few bacteria." These are soon killed by body tissues, "if given a chance." Infection arises when wounds are washed with soap & water, or flushed with antiseptic. This is "almost sure to introduce many new bacteria, and the entire wound may thus become seeded with infectious organisms." (Streptococci and staphylococci, the British found, are usually spread in the hospital by nurses and doctors who do not use masks, or fail to disinfect their fingers...