Word: bacterium
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ATLANTA: Staphylococcus, the bacterium responsible for most hospital-acquired infections, is rapidly becoming resistant to the antibiotic which has kept it in check for decades, the Centers for Disease Control confirmed Wednesday. The development, first reported by the Dallas Morning News, may leave doctors without an adequate way to kill the organism and could eventually lead to an unstoppable wave of deadly infections in hospitals. First discovered in Japan, the new strain showed an "intermediate" level of resistance to the antibiotic vancomycin, which has been used worldwide to fight off Staphylococcus and other stubborn types of bacteria for the past...
...course, no regulatory measure will take the place of finding a way to treat or prevent BSE infection. But the disease may at last be starting to give up its secrets. A number of researchers are convinced that mad cow is caused not by a common bacterium or virus but by a vanishingly small crumb of protein known as a prion...
Group B streptococcus is a bacterium present in many women's bodies...
...worst-case scenario is here," warns Fred Tenover, chief of the CDC's Nosocomial [hospital-transmitted] Pathogens Laboratory. "We are seeing infections that are no longer treatable because the bacterium is resistant to every significant antibiotic ever developed. And, for now, no new drugs are coming down the pike." Drug companies are belatedly working to create new antibiotics, but results are years away...
...bacteria that cause flu-like symptoms in 100,000 Americans each year. The best-known illness is Lyme disease, which, left untreated, can lead to arthritis, paralysis of facial nerves and meningitis. Antibiotics are the standard treatment. Another tick-borne disease, human granulocytic ehrlichiosis, caused by a particularly aggressive bacterium identified in 1994, can result in death if tetracycline treatment does not start early enough. Trials of a preliminary vaccine for Lyme disease began in 1992, and will end later this year...