Word: staphs
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...tempting to think of the tiny pathogens that produce such diseases as malaria, dysentery, TB, cholera, staph and strep as malevolent little beasts, out to destroy higher forms of life. In fact, all they're trying to do is survive and reproduce, just as we are. Human suffering and death are merely unfortunate by-products...
...illness like tuberculosis, the immune system kills the body's own cells in the localized areas where TB germs have taken hold, including the lungs or the bones. With staph or strep, the sheer volume of disease-fighting immune cells can overload blood vessels, ripping tiny tears in the vessel linings; toxins can also damage the vessels directly. Plasma begins to leak out of the bloodstream; blood pressure drops, organs fail, and the body falls into a state of shock. In cholera, bacterial toxins attack intestinal cells, triggering diarrhea, catastrophic dehydration and death...
...cleverer than men." Just as they have adapted to nearly every environmental niche on the planet, they have now begun adjusting to a world laced with antibiotics. It didn't take long. Just a year or two after penicillin went into widespread use, the first resistant strain of staph appeared. As other antibiotics came along, microbes found ways to resist them as well, through changes in genetic makeup. In some cases, for example, the bacteria gained the ability to manufacture an enzyme that destroys the antibiotic...
...Vancomycins are particularly suited to treating staph infections, which are not affected by the other classes of antibiotics," says Evans...
...patient transmission, the risk is minute when compared with other medical dangers. Says Dr. Julie Gerberding, director of HIV prevention at San Francisco General Hospital: "The chance of a patient's dying from HIV infection from the care providers is many times less than the risk from hospital staph infection, anesthetic complications or treatment by an inexperienced surgeon...