Word: bug
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...coli is usually one of the most beneficial, helping to metabolize food in the intestine. In 1982, however, scientists discovered that E. coli wasn't always so benign. That year 26 people in Oregon were felled by a violent infection and intestinal disorder, and when doctors analyzed the bug behind the illness, they found that it was all but indistinguishable from ordinary E. coli, with but a small exception: this breed of the bacterium contained a few strands of genetic reweaving that cause it to produce a powerful toxin its less potent...
Certainly, O157 E. coli is not an easy bug to pick up. It's not an airborne pathogen like a flu virus, and it can have an ill effect only if it's ingested. The vast majority of people who do come down with the infection survive if they are kept hydrated and, in some cases, hospitalized. But up to 1% do die--mostly children, the elderly and people with compromised immune systems. In all cases, antibiotics are not only useless but may actually make things worse, causing the bacteria to rupture and spill their toxin even more widely throughout...
Chilled by a possible blizzard of year 2000-bug lawsuits--one estimate sees $1 trillion in damages--corporations are asking the feds for help. "Because of fear of litigation, many companies are afraid of sharing information" about their readiness says HARRIS MILLER, president of the Information Technology Association of America. President CLINTON agrees, and plans to send a bill to Congress this week designed to get companies to reveal how Y2K-O.K. their computers are, in exchange for partial protection from lawsuits. "The maker of any such statement shall not be liable" for it if the company made...
This summer my good friend and fellow biological anthropologist jetted off to Uganda to study the foraging patterns and social structure of an obscure species of monkey. Her research, conducted in the marshy, bug-infested, tropical jungles of East Africa, is designed to generate data for her senior thesis. When I left Harvard at the end of the school year, she was excitedly packing and talked animatedly about the chance to observe--up close and in person--how these primates fed, traveled and organized themselves. Many people asked if I was going to some place as exotic. Not exactly...
After watching her get 27 inoculations for a slew of strange diseases and realizing that it's darn hard to get a good cup of java in the rainforest (even if you're in Java), I decided to spend my summer in the marshy, bug-infested, urban jungle of Washington...