Word: bacterium
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...Biological Weapons Germ warfare has been around since at least the Middle Ages, when armies besieging a city would catapult corpses infected with the black plague over the walls. Today the bugs authorities most fear are anthrax (a bacterium) and smallpox (a virus). Both are highly lethal: the former kills nearly 90% of its victims, the latter some 30%. Anthrax is not communicable; smallpox, on the other hand, can be transmitted with horrifying ease from one person to another. "The feelings of uncertainty, of who is infected, of who will get infected, are the main advantages of biowarfare," says Stephen...
...item about critters that can spoil your summertime fun [NOTEBOOK, July 16], we said mosquitoes carry the E. coli bacterium. They...
...quite sure why. That's because much about the disease remains a mystery. Scientists like Scott are convinced it's carried not by a virus or a bacterium but by a rogue protein called a prion (see diagram). Unfortunately, prions can't be detected in a blood or tissue test; only their brain-riddling effect is apparent, and then usually just on autopsy. They can't be destroyed, moreover, by cooking or even by radiation. So if the BSE prion somehow did manage to enter the U.S. food supply, it might cause at least a few deaths before anyone could...
...Mass., has an injectable form of one such agent--daptomycin--in late-stage clinical trials. Like tetracycline, it was derived from filamentous bacteria that dwell in both soil and water. But daptomycin does not work as tetracycline does by inhibiting cellular metabolism. Rather, it disrupts the conformation of the bacterium's cell membrane, more like penicillin. The way daptomycin does this appears to be unique; in other words, the resistance that disease-causing bacteria have developed to penicillin should not readily transfer to daptomycin...
...years doctors tried to stir immune reactions against cancers with a weakened tuberculosis bacterium called bacille Calmette-Guerin (BCG), but had only middling success. What has given the old idea a shot in the arm, so to speak, is biotechnology. Researchers like NCI's Dr. Steven Rosenberg have been able to isolate fragments from the surface of melanoma cells. Injected into the body, these antigens trick the immune system into producing a flood of killer T cells, which then go after the tumor cells containing the telltale fragments...