Quotes About Bacterium

Rune was taught that leprosy is rarely contagious. The causative bacterium lives in the environment, more so in unclean settings, but only those with unique susceptibility get the disease. He recalls Professor Mehr in Malmö dressing leprous wounds with impunity, saying, "Worry about other diseases you might get from your patients, not leprosy." Indeed, Rune lost one classmate to tuberculosis, and another to sepsis from a scalpel cut.

I wish, I wish I were a poisonous bacterium.

As in all pre-industrial mortality crises, it would have been quite normal for large numbers to flee the towns at the onset of an epidemic, and on this occasion such a response would have been entirely rational, for the impact of the plague was far more severe in confined and congested environments where rats (or whatever actually was the vector of the deadly bacterium Yersinia pestis) could breed and move freely around.

But if you believe God's divine judgment and you countenance reincarnation, then it may be reasonably assumed that a certain bacterium living in the anus of a particularly ancient hatchetfish at the bottom of the ocean is the recycled and fully sentient soul of Adolf Hitler glimmering miserably through the cloacal muck in which he is periodically bathed and nourished.

Later that day Frisch looked me up and said, "You work in a microbiology lab. What do you call the process in which one bacterium divides into two?" And I answered, "binary fission." He wanted to know if you could call it "fission" alone, and I said you could.

Halrloprillalar's tale of the bacterium that eats superconductor is in our records, the Hindmost said.

You will find superconducting wire and fabric stored aboard the lander. It is not the same superconductor the Ringworld used. The bacterium will not touch it. I thought we might need trade goods.

Today, we know that viruses are submicroscopic entities twenty times smaller than a bacterium. They contain a core of genetic material covered by a protein capsule, and they reproduce exclusively within living cells.

If I were looking for a bacterium that could eat oil, I'd be collecting samples of dirt from the middle of busy freeways. I don't know if I'd find one, but I'm sure I'd discover something interesting.

In our cultural collective imagination, the food safety threat that looms largest is botulism, the rare but often deadly neurological disease caused by botulinum, "the most poisonous substance known to humans,"2 a toxin produced by the bacterium Clostridium botulinum. Early

a bacterium named H. pylori that can cause ulcers. The bacterium may provide a clue to human migration patterns, for it is an Asian strain, and not the more usual Asian-African hybrids present in today's European population. This discovery suggests that the additional migrations that brought African strains to Europe had not yet taken place by Ötzi's time.

A world without glass would strike at the foundation of modern progress: the extended lifespans that come from understanding the cell, the virus, and the bacterium; the genetic knowledge of what makes us human; the astronomer's knowledge of our place in the universe. No material on Earth mattered more to those conceptual breakthroughs than glass.

Our carelessness is all the more alarming since the discovery that many other ailments may be bacterial in origin. The process of discovery began in 1983 when Barry Marshall, a doctor in Perth, Western Australia, found that many stomach cancers and most stomach ulcers are caused by a bacterium called Helicobacter pylori.

The most celebrated germ expert in the world is almost certainly Dr. Charles P. Gerba of the University of Arizona, who is so devoted to the field that he gave one of his children the middle name Escherichia, after the bacterium Escherichia coli.

Today nearly two billion people on earth may host the tuberculosis bacterium. Over the next decade, ninety million will develop active TB. Eventually thirty million will die. Tuberculosis, once the most Romantic of illnesses, is now the deadliest disease on earth. Controlling the bacterium is the twenty-first century's greatest public health challenge.

If left untreated, Lyme disease can be crippling, yet it is a difficult illness to contract: a tick needs to attach itself to your body for at least twenty-four hours. Even then, two weeks worth of commonly prescribed antibiotics will kill the bacterium.

If caught early, Lyme is easily treated with antibiotics. But activists, and many researchers, have long contended that tens of thousands of people remain unaware that they have been infected - sometimes for years, during which the bacterium can spread to the heart, nervous system, and brain.

Racism was a little like that. Sometimes the initial symptoms were small: microaggressions here, simmering resentment there. If you dealt with it head-on, maybe you could keep it contained. If you didn't deal with it, though, it came back with a vengeance: just like that little bacterium. Came back worse. Entrenched. So entrenched, in fact, the longer you let it go, the harder it was to control, and soon everything started to break down.

untreated cholera patient may eventually die from producing diarrheal fluid at a rate of several gallons per day. At least for a while, though, as long as the patient is still alive, the cholera bacterium profits from being massively broadcast into the water supplies of its next victims. Provided that each victim thereby infects on the average more than one new victim, the bacterium will spread, even though the first host happens to die.

Staph colonization is remarkable. There is no other disease-causing bacterium that is carried, without causing infection, by such a substantial slice of the population. The

Still, on average, 97 percent of the MRSA isolates were USA300. In addition, 74 percent of them were a single identical strain, dubbed USA300–0114. For a bacterium that usually was extraordinarily diverse, this was unheard-of.11

Nothing is more conservative than a bacterium.