Word: funguses
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Accompanying The Pursuit of the Graf Spee at the Keith Memorial is a foolish bit of movie-making called The Unknown Terror. This terror turns out to be a supposedly virulent fungus that threatens to inundate the world. But since the terror looks like nothing so much as a mass of soapsuds, it surely deserves some sort of award for the sickliest monster of the year...
...complained that their corn had a mysterious disease. It looked as if it were dying of drought, but when rain fell, the corn did not recover. The disease spread, and last year sample plants were sent to North Carolina State College, where plant pathologists could find no bacterium, virus, fungus or other malefactor to account for the trouble. Then a graduate student from India took a careful look at the sick corn and recognized among its roots the underground stems of witchweed, which had never before invaded the Western Hemisphere...
...justified: 1) streptomycin with other drugs (such as isoniazid) to discourage the appearance of resistant tubercle bacilli; 2) penicillin with streptomycin for inflammation of the heart lining (endocarditis); 3) tetracycline (or related antibiotics) with nystatin, not routinely but in some cases, to guard against secondary infection with the fungus monilia. Granting exceptions such as these, the Archives' editorialists conclude: "It is our firm conviction that the promotion and sale of such combinations should be discouraged...
Named after the Dutch pathologist who first described it, the disease is caused by a fungus, Ceratostomella ulmi, which is introduced into the trees by an unattractive European elm bark beetle, Scolytus multistriatus. Toxins and gummosis produced by the fungus in the tree's water-conducting vessels may kill it in six months. Once disease is detected, death may be retarded, somewhat as in cancer, by removing more and more of the affected parts. Widespread use of preventative measures, such as burning old or dying trees to kill the beetles, or spraying and feeding the trees to discourage inhabitation, have...
...apparently began somewhere in the Far East, and travelling West, enjoyed moderate success with European varieties of elm. It was not until 1919, however, that Cerastomella really caught hold; beetles carried to this country on elm logs to be used for furniture veneer somehow escaped, and carried the fungus to the Elysian Fields of Unius americana. Travelling up the Connecticut River Valley into New England, and westward as far as the Mississippi, the beetle-fungus team has outrun its pursuers, cutting a determined swath which pathologists estimate will exterminate most of the genus in another ten or twenty years...