Word: bacillus
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...progress report published this week by Manhattan's Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research. In many of the cancers, including leukemias of domestic fowl and laboratory animals, a virus is an essential factor. But to say that a virus causes the cancer may be an oversimplification. The tubercle bacillus is the one essential factor in tuberculosis, but mil lions of people carry the bacillus without ever developing the disease. By analogy, researchers argue, it may be that viruses, or viruslike particles of whatever origin, are essential factors in human as well as in animal cancers. But it takes something...
Dermatologists at Kaiser Foundation Hospital discovered that both mother and son had been infected with a microbe that is close kin to the bacillus of tuberculosis. Theirs were the first reported cases, say Dr. Sheldon Swift and Harold Cohen in the New England Journal of Medicine, in which a fish tank served as the incubator. The germ, undiscovered until the early 1950s, had previously been found nourishing only in swimming pools. There it has caused several outbreaks of what has usually been called simply sore elbow...
Chloromycetin. which is Parke. Davis' trade name for the potent antibiotic chloramphenicol. got FDA approval in 1949. It attacked many bacteria against which penicillin was useless, notably the typhoid bacillus; equally important, it was the first effective drug against psittacosis (caused by an unusually large virus) and against such diseases as typhus, scrub typhus and spotted fever (caused by related microbes called rickettsiae ). Not until 1952, when hundreds of thousands of patients had had the drug-often for viral respiratory infections against which neither it nor any other antibiotic is effective-did evidence arise that it had caused...
...that is completely preventable (by keeping water and food free of contamination by sewage), cholera has been spreading throughout southeast Asia from Red China since last summer. An epidemic reached the Philippines last September. Elpidio Valencia, then Health Secretary, correctly identified it as "choleriform enteritis caused by a vibrio (bacillus) called El Tor," which he less soundly defined as a "mild" form of cholera. A presidential campaign was in progress, and the regime of President Carlos P. Garcia was anxious to downplay any threat to the nation's health...
Throughout his research career Pappenheimer has retained a keen interest in infectious disease. In particular, the diphtheria bacillus has fascinated him. This microscopic organism produces one of the most potent poisons known in biology. The toxin is, in fact, so powerful that a few molecules of it suffice to kill a cell. An easily made by product of the toxin, diphtheria toxoid, is harmless and serves as an excellent immunizing agent. With the virtually universal immunization of children in Europe and the United States, diphtheria has been "licked" in the medical sense. But it still provides many challenging biological questions...