Word: staphylococcus
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Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Plasmodium falciparum. Staphylococcus aureus. Streptococcus pneumoniae. Enterococcus faecium. Neisseria gonorrhoeae. The list of microbial scourges that have developed immunity to one or more of the drugs used to treat them is growing ever longer, and in a number of cases physicians are running out of options. In U.S. hospitals, more than 20% of all enterococcus infections, which include infections of the gastrointestinal tract, heart valve and blood, are now resistant to vancomycin, for many years the antibiotic of last resort. Even more worrisome, insensitivity to vancomycin--which nurses and physicians in intensive-care units refer...
Serendipity intervenes: in the London summer of 1928, an open window in a hospital lab lets in a spore that settles on a staphylococcus-culture dish left unwashed. A mold grows and contaminates the staphylococcus. The lab user returns. Because he's bacteriologist Alexander Fleming, and because his lab has not been cleaned, penicillin is discovered...
...probably caused by the overuse of the wonder drug. According to figures released Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control, more than 200 people in Minnesota and North Dakota have become ill - and four have died - after contracting a lethal strain of the staph germ known as staphylococcus aureus. Most disturbingly, the mutated germ apparently came not from the hothouse environment of hospitals - where it is common but considered manageable - but from somewhere outside...
...drifted in from a mycology lab one floor below. Luck would have it that Fleming had decided not to store his culture in a warm incubator, and that London was then hit by a cold spell, giving the mold a chance to grow. Later, as the temperature rose, the Staphylococcus bacteria grew like a lawn, covering the entire plate--except for the area surrounding the moldy contaminant. Seeing that halo was Fleming's "Eureka" moment, an instant of great personal insight and deductive reasoning. He correctly deduced that the mold must have released a substance that inhibited the growth...
...stuff of which scientific myths are made. Fleming, a young Scottish research scientist with a profitable side practice treating the syphilis infections of prominent London artists, was pursuing his pet theory--that his own nasal mucus had antibacterial effects--when he left a culture plate smeared with Staphylococcus bacteria on his lab bench while he went on a two-week holiday...