Word: staphylococci
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...seemed just another minor setback when, on a September morning in 1928, Dr. Alexander Fleming looked at a little glass dish in which he had been growing some staphylococci (the germs that flourish in boils) and saw that the culture was "spoiled." A kind of claim-jumping mold had moved in and started its own colonies among the staph. A less observant scientist, or one more fussy about keeping a tidy laboratory, would have thrown out the adulterated growth. But Fleming's keen blue eye noticed a peculiarity: around each patch of mold growth was a bare ring where...
Experimenting with animals, Sloan-Kettering researchers set out five years ago to find a chemical compound that would selectively attack types of cancer in the way that sulfa drugs attack streptococci or penicillin controls staphylococci...
...only important bacteria that have shown significant resistance, Sir Alexander insisted, are the staphylococci (which cause boils and wound infections), and he denied that these have become resistant after exposure to the drug. These strains were resistant all along, he argued, but made up only 2-3% of the staphylococci; now they are involved in 50% of cases treated in hospitals and 10% of those treated outside-but only because penicillin has killed off the other strains...
...careful, warned the Mayo Clinic's Dr. P. T. Sloss. The trouble is most likely to develop on the fourth day of treatment with aureomycin or terramycin. The drugs kill many of the bacteria normally found in the intestine, and give a chance for resistant strains of staphylococci to multiply and poison the system. In such cases (so far, rare), the patient gets symptoms like those of cholera, and will die in a day or two, Dr. Sloss said, unless the drugs are promptly stopped. Effective drug against the staphylococcus bugs: erythromycin...
...test tube. In less than a week, there was a felt-like growth at the mouth of the tube and a half-inch of cloudy liquid below it. To Dr. Fleming's amazement, the liquid in which the culture grew, even when diluted 800 times, prevented staphylococci from growing at all: "It was therefore some two or three times as strong in that respect as pure carbolic acid...