Word: bacillus
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...crisis management. To place a Vice President in charge of crisis management would be a departure, but the vice presidency can be almost anything the President wants it to be. Nixon, who literally "learned" the presidency in eight years under Eisenhower, isolated Spiro Agnew as if he were a bacillus. In at least one White House meeting that I attended, President Johnson allotted the loquacious Hubert Humphrey five minutes in which to speak ("Five minutes, Hubert!"); then Johnson stood by, eyes fixed on the sweep-second hand of his watch, while Humphrey spoke, and when the Vice President went over...
...killed an estimated 20 million people, roughly one-third of the Continent's population, in a terrifying 2½-year rampage. The disease has largely disappeared today because of improved sanitation, measures to control the rodents that carry it, and the use of antibiotics to combat the plague bacillus. At the last count in 1980 there were 505 cases worldwide...
...Department researchers along with local experts have been releasing a large nonbiting mosquito nicknamed Big Tox (after its scientific name, Toxorhynchites ambionensis), whose larvae dine on the larvae of smaller biting mosquitoes. Scientists have also had success with bacterial warfare: applying a larvae-killing toxin from the soil bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis israelensis (which was discovered in Israel). But BTI is expensive, must be applied directly to a breeding site, and could encourage proliferation of BTi-resistant mosquitoes...
...population, British authorities asked scientists at the Porton Down bacteriological research unit to conduct a series of experiments. The site: Gruinard Island, a bleak, uninhabited, 1½ mile-long patch of land that lies just 600 yds. off the west coast of northern Scotland. The tests were conducted with Bacillus anthracis, better known as anthrax, which has lethal and well-documented effects on both animals and humans. Anthrax is believed to have caused the fifth plague in Egypt mentioned in the Book of Exodus, and an outbreak of the disease swept through southern Europe in the 17th century, killing thousands...
Sure enough, the first package of dirt, weighing 10 Ibs., was found the same day near the Porton Down laboratories, and analysis showed that it contained Bacillus anthracis. Although the box that showed up at Blackpool did not contain anthrax spores, officials said the soil was similar to that on Gruinard Island...