Word: pathogenicity
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Another way to protect flocks is to block the virus from ever alighting here. Whether that can be done depends on how the pathogen arrives. Everybody's favorite suspects these days seem to be migrating birds. If you check a map of migration flyways, it's pretty easy to trace a potential route for an infected bird from Europe to Canada and then on down through the U.S. But would that really happen...
...favorites of scientists studying climate change. Quick and polychromatic, the frogs spend their days near stream banks, where their constant motion and vibrant hues make it easy for researchers to count them. Previous studies have shown that it's not heat alone that kills harlequins but also a pathogen--the chytrid fungus--that attacks their skin. The chytrid is actually a cool-weather organism, doing best at temperatures from 63°F to 77°F. Paradoxically, an effect of global warming is to increase cloud cover in the tropical forests, lowering daytime temperatures and making the frogs more vulnerable to fungal...
...wouldn't know it to read the papers, but doctors have lately been scrambling to contain a growing epidemiological brushfire, one caused by a nasty little bug almost none of us have heard of but too many of us could encounter soon. The pathogen is known as Clostridium difficile-or C. diff as the scientists call it-a bacterium that used to confine itself to elderly or very ill hospital patients, causing severe diarrhea and nausea. A few doses of antibiotics used to be all it took to knock...
...antibiotics appear to be especially susceptible-no surprise since the use of such germ killers can, paradoxically, help drug-resistant strains emerge. But disease trackers are alarmed to discover that common heartburn medications can also dramatically boost your risk of contracting C. diff. Whatever the co-factors in the pathogen's rise, health officials are fighting to control it-fast...
...Overuse of antibiotics helped breed the new bug in two ways. First, the simple rules of natural selection dictate that when a drug kills most of the members of any species of pathogen, those individuals that do withstand the assault did so because they had a natural resistance to the chemical. It's the same phenomenon that breeds pesticide-resistant insects on farms. What's more, since many antibiotics wipe out numerous species of bacteria at once, the drugs inadvertently create a nice, clear field in which those that do survive can thrive...