Word: pneumococcus
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They have many other ways of picking up genes as well. The DNA can come from viruses, which have acquired it while infecting other microbes. Some types of pneumococcus, which causes a form of pneumonia, even indulge in a microbial version of necrophilia by soaking up DNA that spills out of dead or dying bacteria. This versatility means bacteria can acquire useful traits without having to wait for mutations in the immediate family...
...care centers provide another setting that amplifies microbial mischief. & In 1989, for instance, eight children in a center near Cleveland, Ohio, came down with chronic middle-ear infections caused by the same antibiotic- resistant strain of pneumococcus. Subsequent throat swabs revealed that 50 of the 250 children enrolled at the center had been infected but had not yet shown symptoms. Such outbreaks could have serious consequences: recurrent middle-ear infections can impair hearing, and pneumococcus can also cause meningitis and bacteremia, an infection of the blood that may spread to the joints, heart and even the brain. In the Third...
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...