Word: pathogenicity
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...spread primarily by sexual activity and through tainted blood in transfusions or on addicts' dirty needles. (Hepatitis A is passed along mainly through contaminated foods.) Researchers at Chiron Corp., a biotechnology firm in Emeryville, Calif., that first identified the C virus, have devised a test for the pathogen that can be used to screen the blood supply...
Chiron's initial breakthrough was to isolate a viral protein from blood samples taken from patients with non-A, non-B hepatitis. By cloning large quantities of the protein, the company was able to develop a test to detect its presence in blood. Chiron called the pathogen the "hepatitis-C virus." In clinical studies done at the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and laboratories in Italy and Japan, blood samples from patients thought to have non-A, non-B hepatitis were screened using Chiron's test. At least 80% of the samples tested positive...
With that information, Gajdusek, who won a Nobel Prize for his efforts, uncovered a new kind of pathogen, a slow virus that may be akin to those that cause other degenerative diseases, like multiple sclerosis and Parkinson's disease. The solution for the Fore was a government mandate that keeps the dead out of the stew pots; by the end of the century the Laughing Death should be eradicated. Gajdusek's discovery may have brought a step closer a solution for victims of other slow viruses as well...
...Silverstein of Manhattan's Rockefeller University have found that it belongs to a select group of bacteria that evade the body's immune system by turning it to their own advantage. Like the microbes that cause tuberculosis and leprosy, the bug is what scientists dub an intracellular pathogen. It invades white blood cells called monocytes, which normally kill bacteria, and uses material within these cells to propagate-in droves. In one experiment at Rockefeller, Legionella added to a culture of monocytes increased 100,000-fold within days...
...microbe for recombinant DNA research. But for the time being, genetic engineers have available a tailor-made microbe that cannot survive outside the laboratory and that cannot colonize or even live in the human intestinal tract. Nor is this the only indication that the bug would make a poor pathogen, or disease organism. Curtiss' handmade microbe will not survive in human serum-including that of cancer patients. It is also easily destroyed by common household detergents...