Word: bacterium
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...suffered an epidemic of pertussis (whooping cough) last year. There were 352 cases (none fatal), compared with 542 cases in the 13 years from 1979 to 1992. The alarming part was that most of the children had been properly vaccinated, suggesting that an unusually hardy strain of the pertussis bacterium might be emerging. Another disturbing statistic: there were more than 6,500 cases nationwide, the largest number in more than 26 years...
...fear of encountering ticks carrying Lyme disease, a potentially chronic, arthritis-like condition. Now the Journal of the American Medical Association has reported on another tick-borne disease, which struck 25 people in Wisconsin and Minnesota, killing two. It is caused by a new variety of the Ehrlichia bacterium, which was first detected in humans in 1954. Doctors are concerned because life-threatening Ehrlichia infections may be misdiagnosed as Lyme disease or even a bad cold...
...known to medicine has become resistant to at least one antibiotic, and several are immune to more than one. One of the most alarming things about the cholera epidemic that has killed as many as 50,000 people in Rwandan refugee camps is that it involves a strain of bacterium that can't be treated with standard antibiotics. Relief agencies had to scramble for the right medicines, which gave the disease a head start in its lethal rampage...
...medicine's worst nightmares is the development of a drug-resistant strain of severe invasive strep A, the infamous flesh-eating bacteria. What appears to make this variant of strep such a quick and vicious killer is that the bacterium itself is infected with a virus, which spurs the germ to produce especially powerful toxins. (It was severe, invasive strep A that killed Muppeteer Jim Henson in 1990.) If strep A is on the rise, as some believe, it will be dosed with antibiotics, and may well become resistant to some or all of the drugs...
...organisms' genetic material. Usually the traits will be either useless or debilitating, but once in a while they'll confer a survival advantage, allowing the individual to live longer and bear more offspring. Over time, the new survival trait -- camouflage stripes on a zebra, antibiotic resistance in a bacterium -- will become more and more common in the population until it's universal...