Word: fungus
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Pigeons carry the infectious agents of a dozen diseases. They may reward the owner of the hand that feeds them with a dose of ornithosis (better known as psittacosis or parrot fever). In New York and probably in most U.S. cities, pigeons are also the principal carriers of the fungus Cryptococcus neoformans, or CN. The fungus does not seem to make the birds sick, perhaps because their blood heat is too high, but they drop it all over the place in their excreta...
...When the fungus goes no farther than the windpipe and lungs, it may touch off what seems like a bad cold. More severe cases are often mistaken for bronchitis and tuberculosis. But the deadliest form of the disease is inflammation of the brain covering. Cryptococcal meningitis was always fatal until the antifungal drug, amphotericin B, came into use six years ago. Now the death rate is down to about 30% of meningitis victims. But nobody knows exactly how many cases of CN lung disease there are because the vast majority are not diagnosed correctly. New York City records about...
What saddens some Germans even more than the traffic is the news that more than 200 of the ancient dwellings in Heidelberg's Altstadt-the "Old Town" where generations of Heidelberg students loved to stroll-are near collapse from neglect and fungus rot. Loath to destroy the Altstadt (and along with it a lucrative tourist trade), Heidelbergers are equally reluctant to try to raise the $50 million needed to restore the buildings...
Even though the disease cannot be cured, sprays can kill the beetles that carry its deadly fungus from tree to tree. And if dead or dying trees are burned, the beetles have fewer places to breed. But still the plague spreads, even though many Middle Western cities, where elms are the most common and sometimes the only shade trees, have demonstrated that the two-part program works well. Chicago, which destroyed diseased trees and sprayed too, lost only 0.7% of its elms last year; Champaign-Urbana and Bloomington, where no systematic effort was made, lost 95% of their elms...
...year study proved that cotton yields would be cut by 40%. Production of many kinds of fruit and vegetables would be impossible; unsprayed apple trees, for instance, no longer yield fruit that is sound enough to be marketed.*Potato fields swept by the Colorado beetle or late blight (the fungus that caused the great Irish potato famine of 1846) yield hardly any crop...