Word: germ
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...latest bulletins from the germ front come on top of a long series of horror stories. For years now people have been reading about -- and suffering from -- all sorts of new and resurgent diseases. As if AIDS were not enough to worry about, there was a rise in other sexually transmitted infections, including herpes, syphilis and gonorrhea. People heard about the victims who died in the Northwest from eating undercooked Jack in the Box hamburgers tainted with a hazardous strain of E. coli bacteria. They were told to cook their chicken thoroughly to avoid food poisoning from salmonella bacteria...
...many standard antibiotics. Both microbes are commonly transmitted from patient to patient in the cleanest of hospitals, and they are usually cured routinely. But one strain of hospital-dwelling staph can now be treated with only a single antibiotic -- and public health officials have no doubt that the germ will soon become impervious to that one too. Hospitals could become very dangerous places to go -- and even more so if strep also develops universal resistance...
Madness spreads like an eager germ through the camps that have doubled, then doubled again in size. Between the town of Goma and the airport, a woman dances naked down the highway, cursing at the listless crowds and at the corpses lying on mats by the roadside. A man at the edge of a mass grave laughs in delight when he manages to toss the lifeless body of a child squarely into the middle of the burial pit. A team of laborers is moving bodies from a field to the trucks nearby, when a young man lying among the corpses...
...combat bacterial food poisoning, the U.S. Agriculture Department proposes stricter poultry processing. Under new rules, chickens would be inspected more closely for contamination with fecal matter, and bird carcasses would be treated with germ-killing sprays or rinses...
...short answer, say doctors: no way. While the streptococcus bacterium is very common -- it causes the strep throat that everyone catches sooner or later -- the publicized cases involve a deadly variant of the germ that is rare. Up to 15,000 people come down with invasive Group A strep every year, and perhaps 3,000 die. The infection is easily treatable, though, if caught early. Moreover, the microbe has been around for years, and no one thinks it will suddenly cause a pandemic...