Word: bacterium
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...short story titled The Egg. Anderson's melancholy view is more apropos than ever. The poor egg, already condemned by heart specialists for its high cholesterol content, was blamed in last week's Journal of the American Medical Association for yet another scourge: food poisoning. Illness due to the bacterium Salmonella enteritidis -- vomiting, stomach cramps, diarrhea, fever and headache -- has increased sevenfold in the northeastern U.S. during the past decade, according to the Centers for Disease Control. And during a recent two-year period in the region, eggs caused 77% of those cases traceable to a food source. The most...
...pleasure and display. Untreatable diseases made 50 years an advanced age. The slow plague of syphilis is one of the smoldering subtexts of Simon's brimming narrative. Prostitutes gave the contagion to their customers, who passed it on to their wives. If women were not rendered barren by the bacterium, there were always the risks of childbirth and puerperal fever. Women were meant to provide heirs and cement profitable agreements through wedlock...
...been a year of dramatic progress and turbulence for scientists experimenting for the first time outside the lab with genetically engineered bacteria. This past April, California scientists made the first outdoor tests of ice-minus, a bacterium genetically altered to retard frost formation on leaves. Only four months later, Montana State University Professor Gary Strobel created a national outcry when it became known that he had flouted strict federal regulations by failing to get approval before injecting elm trees with bacteria designed to combat Dutch elm disease. This week Clemson University scientists, mindful of public fears about the escape...
...group of children, in and around Lyme, Conn., who were suffering from a mysterious form of arthritis. He traced the outbreak to speck-size ticks of the genus Ixodes, carried mainly by mice and deer. In 1982 federal researchers isolated the culprit from the tick: a corkscrew-shaped bacterium, or spirochete, similar to the one that causes syphilis...
...current experiments, almost everyone agrees, do not pose any such threat. They involve a modest bit of genetic engineering on the bacterium Pseudomonas syringae, a common parasite that lives on the bark and leaves of many plants. The bacterium produces a protein that serves as a seed for the formation of ice crystals when the temperature drops below 32 degrees F. By snipping the seed-making gene from the DNA of the microbe, Berkeley Plant Pathologists Steven Lindow and Nickolas Panopoulos created a mutant form of P. syringae that does not promote frost. They call their new microbe "ice- minus...