Word: staphylococci
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...research team headed by Surgeon Harvey R. Bernard at Barnes Hospital in St. Louis has spent years seeking answers to these fundamental questions. One clear conclusion: surgeons, nurses and patients themselves carry most of the dangerous germs, especially the resistant strains of staphylococci, into the operating theater. Relatively few appear in the air, and it makes little difference whether the air is continually drawn fresh from outdoors, or whether it is recirculated after filtering...
...infected to begin with, 401 got prophylactic antibiotics, while 619 got none. In Surgery, Gynecology & Obstetrics, Dr. Johnstone reports the astonishing result: among those who got the antibiotics, 25% developed infections-almost three times the rate for the other patients. There were four times as many infections caused by staphylococci. Those World War II battlefield germs, notes Dr. Johnstone, were far easier to kill...
Early penicillins were active mainly against the berry-shaped microbes or cocci, such as streptococci, staphylococci and pneumococci. But they were ineffective against most rod-shaped bacteria. And most of them had two other draw backs: they were so quickly destroyed by digestive acids that they had to be injected directly into the bloodstream, and they were destroyed by the enzyme penicillinase. which is produced by resistant strains of staphylococci...
Many newborn babies in hospital nurseries pick up the highly infectious "hospital staph" germs, but what happens then divides the infants into two distinct groups. In one, the staphylococci cause such obvious signs as boils. These cases are moderately infectious to those in contact with them. The other infants show no sign of illness, but are surrounded by such an aura of pullulating bacteria that they are called "cloud babies...
...difference, reports a research team headed by Dr. Heinz F. Eichenwald at Manhattan's New York Hospital, is not in the staphylococci or the babies but in a mysterious third factor. In the American Journal of Diseases of Children, Dr. Eichenwald suggests that this factor operates independently of the staph. It consists, he suspects, of assorted viruses commonly found in the human respiratory tract. How these viruses team with the bacteria to act as a spreading agent is not known, but they do the job so effectively that a single cloud baby can readily infect a whole room...