Word: pasteurella
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...maintain trading empires or other commercial interests, protectionism, inability to adapt to changing economic conditions and intolerance toward minority groups, which encouraged merchant families or religious minorities to leave. And there has been another, frequently overlooked agent of urban decline: disease. For example, the Black Death, caused by the Pasteurella pestis, reappeared in Europe in 1346 when the port city of Kaffa was besieged by the Mongol leader Kipchak khan Janibeg, who catapulted dead bodies into the city (the first recorded case of biological warfare). The plague quickly spread to all Mediterranean port cities and European trading centers, reducing Europe...
...pussyfoot around if you're bitten by a dog or cat. Scientists report that in at least half of all cases, bites carry pasteurella--nasty bacteria that can cause an infection in the blood or joints and, in rare instances, meningitis. If swelling or pain develops, see a doctor promptly...
...disease produces high fever, delirium, and painfully swollen lymph glands form dark discolorations called buboes; death follows massive internal bleeding. People infected with the most virulent, pneumonic form can infect others by sneezing. The villain is a bacillus, Pasteurella pestis, which thrives in rats, the fleas that bite them, and humans exposed to either pest. Destroying fleas and keeping rats from migrating curb the plague, but Viet Nam's fleas have grown more resistant to available insecticides; and, for example, there are only four quarantine inspectors to see that busy harbor ships keep a constant guard against invading rats...
Plague is caused by a bacillus, Pasteurella pestis, whose natural habitat is the rat. Fleas carry it from rats to humans. The disease, called bubonic when it affects the lymph nodes, pneumonic when it attacks the lungs, used to be 90% fatal; nowadays antibiotics and sulfa drugs can defeat it in 90% of cases, and widespread warfare against rats and fleas in underprivileged areas helps prevent outbreaks...
...Moldenkes' new book, Plants of the Bible (Chronica Botanica Co.; $7.50), tries to identify every plant mentioned in the Bible, even to the humble bacterium (Pasteurella pestis) that smote the Israelites with emerods. The job is a tough one, for neither the early writers nor the later translators of the Bible were botanists. They often used the same word for different plants, and different words for the same plant. The botanically innocent scholars who produced the King James Version turned aspens into mulberries and dill into anise. The sycomore that Zacchaeus climbed to catch a glimpse of Jesus...