Word: bacterias
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Doctors have long been warned to go easy on antibiotics and sulfa drugs. When used with routine frequency, such germ killers may defeat their own purpose by leading to ever more resistant germs. Now comes worse news: the appearance of drug-resistant bacteria that can foil several antibiotics at once. The disturbing explanation is that certain germs "catch" this power of resistance simply by contact with one another. As a result, some infections of the intestinal and genitourinary tracts are becoming tougher than ever to treat...
Contagious Cuddling. The germs in question comprise the bacteria Shigella and Salmonella along with Escherichia coli, a common cause of infant diarrhea. Since these organisms reproduce slowly by cell division, microbiologists used to think that it would take a long time for drug-resistant strains to multiply and populate a hospital. Not so, indicates recent research. In addition to cell divi sion, these bacteria have a second way of passing on their "R factor" (drug resistance). When they cuddle up close to other bacteria, the R factor is transmitted by means of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), which bears chemical instructions...
...violence. The story falters in its final pages, but Mossman never relents his graceful ridicule ("The Russian delegation in their square-rigged tunics and striped trousers arrived at the palace, looking like a band that has lost its instruments"). Nor does he abate his unseemly aptitude for discovering bacteria in the milk of human kindness...
...speed through the column-it is sensed by an ionization detector and recorded on a graph as a distinct peak. Within minutes, all of the compounds have passed through the chromatograph, each forming its own peak on the graph. Since the metabolic products of each strain of bacteria contain different chem ical compounds, each chromatogram forms an easily identifiable profile...
Stored Chromatograms. When Alexander and Gould have substantially increased their collection of such bacteria identifications, they hope to store it in a computer, creating a central file similar to the FBI's store of human fingerprints in Washington. Then, when a chromatogram of unidentified bacteria is prepared, it can be fed into the computer, matched electronically with the appropriate chromatogram in the computer's memory, and quickly identified. By using the combination of bacterial fingerprints and computers, says Gould, "detection and identification, which now take days or weeks by classical methods, could be done in hours...