Word: pathogenicity
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...primarily interested in Shigella not only because of its high mortality rate in developing countries, but also because of its recent outbreaks, surprisingly, in the U.S.," she wrote in an e-mail. "Developing more effective treatments against this devastating food-borne pathogen is fascinating to me not only at the microscopic level but also at the macroscopic level, where it becomes clear that cultural and social factors are just as important as the biological factors in causing the disease...
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...
...August 1918, the mild virus apparently reassorted into something positively deadly. Outbreaks caused by the new variant exploded almost simultaneously in three far-flung locations: France, Sierra Leone and Boston. The flu struck with a ferocity that shocked doctors, who feared this strange new pathogen might be an airborne version of the Black Death. Patients died awash in blood and gore, literally drowning as fluid filled their lungs...
Shortridge and Webster immediately recognized the gravity of the chicken-flu outbreak in Hong Kong, at least for the region's chicken industry. They knew that while avian influenza did not ordinarily make its host sick, a benign virus could reassort to produce a pathogen of almost inconceivable lethality. Webster's Memphis lab had observed such a transformation in the wild on two occasions, the first in April 1983, when a relatively mild influenza struck chickens on the vast chicken farms of Pennsylvania. The birds got visibly sick, some died and egg production fell, but overall the outbreak remained only...
Webster assigned a young scientist, Yoshihiro Kawaoka, to try to figure out how the virus transformed itself into such a "hot" pathogen. Kawaoka, now a professor of virology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, compared the genetic structure of viruses from the first and second waves and found only a single, extremely subtle change in the H gene. The two viruses differed by just one nucleotide--one of 1,700 nucleotides that made up the gene...