Word: pneumococcus
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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When penicillin and other antibiotics were introduced more than a generation ago, doctors felt they had finally won the fight against the most common form of bacterial pneumonia. But the tiny spherical pneumococcus bacteria have proved a stubborn foe. They are showing increasing resistance to drugs of all kinds, and bacterial pneumonia is again on the rise; it takes an estimated 25,000 lives a year in the U.S. alone. The bacteria are also a common cause of damaging middle-ear infections in youngsters and meningitis?a dangerous inflammation of the membranes surrounding the brain and spinal cord...
...sickle-cell anemia, a genetic disorder largely confined to blacks that, besides inflicting other damage, impairs the spleen's ability to filter dangerous bacteria out of the blood. Even after two years, Dr. Arthur J. Ammann and his colleagues said, not a single patient had developed a pneumococcus infection; the only reaction from the shots in the arm was a little swelling and a short-lived fever...
...particular, it is known that bacteria can take up naked DNA from solution; and, in fact, transfer of DNA between two strains of pneumococcus has been demonstrated in the animal body. Moreover, bacteria in the gut are constantly exposed to fragments of host DNA that are released as the cells lining the gut die, and bacteria growing in carcasses have a veritable feast of DNA. The efficiency of such uptake of mammalian DNA by bacteria is undoubtedly very low. However, because of the extraordinarily large scale of the exposure in nature, recombinants of this general class must have been formed...
...different types of tumors suffered from different types of infections. Those with Hodgkin's disease, a cancer of the lymphoid system, were particularly susceptible to TB, fungus and viral infections; those with multiple myelomas, or cancers of the bone marrow, were vulnerable to such bacterial infections as streptococcus and pneumococcus. Subsequent observation and experiments at the University of Minnesota convinced Good that there were not one but two basic immune responses. One, controlled by the thymus, was responsible for delayed hypersensitivity, or certain types of allergic responses, and the rejection of foreign tissue. The other, involving blood-borne antibodies, helped...