Word: rickettsias
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Burnet, 53, was still in school when the great influenza wave struck and had no thought that it would mean so much to him later. But he went to work and became a virologist, won fame by isolating the giant virus (rickettsia) which causes Q fever. He was in London in 1933 when influenza virus was first isolated, and his interest became sharply focused. Year after year (especially during World War II, when another epidemic was feared), Burnet went on performing delicate laboratory tests with influenza strains...
...typhus germ is called Rickettsia prowazeki, after Typhus Researchers Howard Taylor Ricketts and Stanislaus Prowazek. In feeding, the infected louse bows its head, pricks the skin with sharp stylets for bloodsucking, and meanwhile often excretes Rickettsiae on to the skin. When a victim scratches his itching louse bite, he is apt to infect himself by rubbing Rickettsiae into the scratch...
...carried by the wood tick (Dermacentor andersoni), in the East by the dog tick (Dermacentor variabilis). But only one in 500 ticks is infected. The ticks, which are brown, about three-sixteenths of an inch long, with eight spiny legs, carry within their bodies a virus of the family Rickettsia (named after Howard Taylor Ricketts, one of the martyred scientists). Another form of Rickettsia is the virus of typhus fever. A tick passes on the virus through a bite; the virus also may penetrate the skin if a tick is crushed between the fingers...
Typhus and Typhoid. Carried by the louse and the rat-flea is Rickettsia prowazeki, a tiny organism which causes the dirty pink eruptions, burning fever and wild delirium of typhus fever. Prevention is simple: "no lice, no typhus." Also louse-borne is trench fever, a milder relative of typhus, which made its first appearance in World...
From the U. S. Public Health Service last week came a new, streamlined mass-production method of culturing Rickettsia prowazeki. Bacteriologist Herald Rea Cox of the Rocky Mountain Laboratory at Hamilton, Mont., announced that he had injected the yolks of fertile, six-day-old chicken eggs with viruses of typhus fever as well as those of the related Rocky Mountain spotted fever, which occurs chiefly in Western States...