Word: staphylococcus
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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These natural transfers can be crucial to the survival of the bacterium. It is through new plasmids, for example, that bacteria like Staphylococcus aureus have become resistant to penicillin. The plasmid acquired by the staph bug contained a gene that directs the production of a penicillinase, an enzyme that cracks apart invading penicillin molecules, making them ineffective. Different plasmids, sometimes passed from one bacterium to another, can order up still another kind of chemical weapon, a so-called restriction enzyme, which can sever the DNA of an invading virus, say, at a predetermined point...
...Journal and other professional publications last June, was similar to hundreds of other pitches for drugs. Aimed at the doctors who write prescriptions, Lederle Laboratories' illustrated three-page spread implied, among other things, that Minocin is superior to all other available tetracyclines and effective against a strain of staphylococcus bacteria. Yet a follow-up ad, which ran in the same journals nearly three months later, was strikingly different. It quoted a statement by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration that the earlier claims were misleading. It also conceded that Minocin is a tetracycline variation with all the limitations...
...Medicine. Writing in the A.M.A. Journal, Drs. Berel Abrams and Norton Waterman report that money carries copious quantities of potentially harmful bacteria. They base their conclusion on analysis of 150 coins worth $13.47 and 50 bills totaling $150. The coins were relatively clean; only 13.3% yielded common bacteria like Staphylococcus. But 42% of the bills carried that type as well as Escherichia coli. To avoid contamination by cash, the Louisville researchers suggest that people get rid of their money rapidly, something that few have trouble doing today. In order to continue their research, the doctors have agreed to accept...
...declined to name the hospitals, but one of them volunteered news of the problem. Yale-New Haven Hospital announced that it had closed one of its six nurseries after pediatricians began finding colonies of staphylococcus bacteria-and mild infections-in infants. Critics of the FDA lost no time in blaming the agency's action for the outbreak. Dr. Louis Gluck, pediatrics professor at the University of California at San Diego and one of the first to report on hexachlorophene's benefits years ago, said: "There's no question about it. The ban on the use of hexachlorophene...
...Agnew can alter that. New things-or newly discovered things -need new names. When a new microorganism swims into the biologist's ken, he does not reach back into folklore and call it a "small dragon"; he quarries the lexicon of a very dead language and concocts, say, "staphylococcus," a word never known before on land or sea, and therefore relatively free of confusing associations. (It is true that staphylo means "bunch of grapes," but since hardly anyone knows this, there is minimal danger that people will be misled into thinking an infection is caused by a bunch...