Bug etc turns up in contents of meal prior to X-ray

Usage examples of bacterium.

Terrorists have used anthrax bacteria to infect, to kill, and to terrorize innocent people.

Our assumptions had been based principally on how the anthrax bacterium acted in settings that were almost preindustrial--before most buildings were air conditioned, before technology allowed us to sort mail with the force of air, and before we had advanced medical technologies to help us stabilize patients and make more definitive diagnoses.

If fitted correctly--and this is harder than it sounds--respirators can reduce exposure to anthrax bacteria and other harmful agents.

The anthrax bacterium grows naturally throughout the world, including the United States.

In the inhalational anthrax cases following September 11, the average time from exposure to the bacteria to the onset of symptoms was four days.

But experts believe that illness may occur as long as sixty days after exposure to anthrax spores, because observations have shown that the spores can take that long to change to active bacteria.

First, only certain strains of anthrax bacteria are exceptionally deadly.

Nor does smallpox have the ability to form spores, the hard shells that protect anthrax and botulism bacteria indefinitely in a state of suspended animation.

Like anthrax, the bacterium Clostridium botulinum forms a hard shell, called a spore, to protect itself when the environment turns inhospitable.

There are many parallels between the bacteria that cause anthrax and botulism: Both form spores and come naturally from the soil.

The antibody coating seemed to stiffen and tighten and the bacterium within writhed.

Once trapped in the node, the bacterium is handled by antibodies or, if that fails, by white cells mobilized for battle.

A bacterium, moving blindly through a cloud of hovering antibodies, seemed to attract them, to pull them in to itself.

In appearance they are not very different from conventional bacteria, but at high magnification, or rather, at a relatively high magnification, the highest magnification a conventional school microscope is capable of, if you look very carefully you could see some particles inside that have regular geometric shapes.

Some of the bacteria were marked with a felt pen circles, and inside those one could indeed see some rectangles and geometrically perfect spheres that were interconnected by some strings and pipes.