Saturday 23 January 2016

we are a culture, not a costume

The discovery of a class of bacteria—which are everywhere, in the soil and among our beneficial gut population—which can only be described as vampiric took place several years ago and while I am not sure what direction the research has taken, this strain seems especially timely given that one local hospital was found to be harbouring Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA oder Multiresistante Krankenhauskeime) in some of its wards.
News like that incited a panic among some of the clientele, battle-weary from the likes of Ebola—even though it’s endemic to most treatment facilities already and all would forego the negative publicity. These Micavibrio aeruginosavorus and related specimen called Vampirovibrio chorellavorus are purely predatory and cannot live even in nutrient-rich environments, shunning them, unless there are some other hapless bacteria to feed on—making their study rather difficult since the sample is always a contaminated one, latching on to their victims with enzyme fangs and sucking the life out of them. Subsequent culturing made pathologists hopeful that a living, evolving antibiotic agent could be used to combat those familiars (coming from the word midge, a nigget is a small insect—perhaps like Jiminy Cricket or a flea-circus—that was used as a witch’s minion, and I bet that the same terminology could apply to tinier things like germs) of our own drug abuse and hygiene.