Word: pathogenicity
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Staphylococcus aureus is a dreadful pathogen that invades the body of certain patients after surgery. It most frequently attacks people with weak immune systems, namely infants and the elderly. Intravenous drug users can also be susceptible to community-acquired staphylococcus aureus...
...medical community has reason to be skittish about the disease. The last encephalitis outbreak in Florida occurred in 1990, and during that brief epidemic, 230 people were infected, 11 fatally. The strain of the virus then--as now--was St. Louis encephalitis, a nasty pathogen that at first causes nothing more serious than flulike symptoms but that eventually may cause fever, coma and occasionally death. The New York strain is the rarer but more dangerous Eastern equine encephalitis, a disease that begins with fever, neck stiffness and headaches and may culminate in a swelling of the brain that claims...
...Europeans are unknowingly infected and could die from the disease. Moreover, a number of researchers in the U.S. aren't convinced that some of the same conditions that led to the mad-cow breakout in Britain might not exist here, leading to the same spread of the BSE pathogen. Making things even harder, scientists still can't agree on what that pathogen is--a first step in figuring out how to treat the disease if it does surface. "The only thing that stands between us and an epidemic," says Robert Rohwer, director of molecular virology at the VA Medical Center...
...could be." What concerns Rohwer and others is that the U.S. agricultural industry, like its British counterpart, recycles animal scraps, turning them into both cattle feed and garden fertilizer. Should even one domestic cow develop the disease spontaneously--something that is known to occur in nature--the pathogen could quickly spread through U.S. herds...
...best guess is that Ebola resides in a small, forest-dwelling animal, possibly a rodent. Insects such as mosquitoes, abundant in the rainy season, could transfer the blood-borne pathogen to chimps--or to humans. But, cautions Heymann, that's no more than speculation. "We're still in the dark," he says. Meanwhile, officials in Gabon are playing it safe. Last week they warned villagers not to touch dead animals found in the forest or kill any that are "behaving strangely." Until researchers know what they're dealing with, that's probably prudent. As the villagers of Mayibout now know...