Word: pathogens
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...World Toilet Summit and Expo is like the Star Trek Convention of the waste management and sanitation world. Toilets on show run the gamut from a cardboard box complete with a hole, plastic bag and pouch of waterless magic pathogen-busting dust ($50), to a high-tech 'uber-toilet,' featuring an in-seat warmer/cooler, male and female water jets, an in-bowl light (why, oh why?) and a USB port so you can connect your mp3 player for your soothing tune of choice...
...Parents of these unimmunized kids know that as long as nearly all the other children get their shots, there should not be enough pathogen around to sicken anyone. But that's a fragile shield. Infectious-disease bugs continue to travel the globe, always ready to launch the next big public-health threat. Pockets of intentionally unvaccinated children provide a perfect place for a disease to squat, leading to outbreaks that spread to other unprotected kids, infants and the elderly. Ongoing measles outbreaks in four states are centered in such communities; one originated with an unimmunized boy from San Diego...
...kids who receive the shots but also those who can't receive them-such as newborns and cancer patients with suppressed immune systems. These vulnerable folks depend on riding the so-called herd-immunity effect. The higher the immunization rate in any population, the less likely that a pathogen will penetrate the group and find a susceptible person inside. As immunization rates drop, that protection grows thinner. That's what happened in the current measles outbreaks in the western U.S., and that's what happened in Nigeria in 2001, when religious and political leaders convinced parents that polio vaccines were...
Unlike severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, which emerged with a deadly energy in 2003 and caught health officials by surprise, MRSA isn't exactly a new bug making its first appearance in human hosts. Since the 1960s, hospitals have been battling the staph pathogen--something to be expected in institutions that are, by definition, gathering places for the sick. What is upsetting about the recent reports is that they are coming from outside the hospital, confirming that drug-resistant strains of the bacteria are finding new homes in the community--particularly among kids...
...Department of Agriculture took samples from hives that had been afflicted with colony-collapse disorder (CCD)--the term for the syndrome wiping out the bees--and decoded the genetic material inside them. In a paper published in Science Express on Sept. 6, the group reported that one pathogen-- the recently discovered Israeli acute paralysis virus (IAPV)--was present in more than 90% of the samples, indicating that IAPV might be at least a good marker for CCD, if not a direct cause...