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Scientists Find New Way To Destroy Anthrax
t0rnt0pieces writes "Yahoo news is reporting a story about how scientists have discovered a new way to combat the anthrax bacteria, even if the strain is drug resistant. The method uses an enzyme from bacteriophages, virii which attack bacteria. The scientists say that this method could even be adapted to combat other virii. This truly looks to be a fantastic breakthrough in the treatment of drug-resistant bacterial infections."
Phirst Poast
MODERATORS Crack smoke wafts though air - Dumb shit moderator - Try to suck less, please
KAZAA Fuck R I A A - Network sold behind their backs - Stupid fucking cunts
Slashdot, Where Editors come to SUCK © ® (TM)
HAIKUS
Haiku: to the Slashfags. Fuck slash editors - The cumlicking fags they are - I shit upon them
TACO pondering GOATSE: I stare at the goat - His huge gaping ass so wide - And I want to eat
Haiku: The ancient haiku: - Flame Taco and CowboyNeal - With lame poetry.
CowboyNeal A mountain of fat, - butt cheeks jiggling like Jello. - What an odd poll choice!
CmdrTaco Watching Pokemon - With cum stuck on his goatee. - Newbie loser scum.
Stinky Kathleen Fent Cockeater Taco, - Proposing to Fent online, - I fingered her too.
Rob Malda and Kathleen Fent Chubby breasts, fat ass - Distract us from Rob's boylust. - But they both suck cock!
Taco Tuesday: Too much mexican. - Angry poo, firey hot. - Where's my antacid?
CHOAD licking Taco: Malda in the dark - Swallowing chode for profit - He rips his anus
Fuck KATZ Katz is a Jew - michael is a Mormon - Or is it Timothy?
Martini Fuck off That is fucking good. - I nearly spilt martini - On my nice trousers.
Slap my Ham, rub it off, fuck Spank fast wank it hard - Jerk that dick to Pokemon - Party at Taco's
GOAT I just came again - looking at the goat-see man - more kleenex required
Cock BIRD The Dead Penis Bird - Nailed to the member always - Never falling off
BSD Stare into the night - Sun is setting on your sys - BSD is dead
Michael Michael User Simms - Sifting through all our comments - Censoring bastard
Klerk Trolltalk hard to read - Information desires - Wideness for us all
Cobalt Really tired now - Off to masturbate to sleep - See you at the day
Humorless Moderator Crack smoke wafts through air - Humorless moderator - Why do you hate me?
Taco, I want you to fuck me in the ass please. I am dying to be anally accosted. I want to be ravaged like hog. I want you to dress like a farmer and make me oink like a pig. I want an ass reaming like no other. Taco, I haven't had this kind of lust for you since the crazy college days. We used to butt fuck each other in the stalls. You always told me not to flush and preferred using my feces as apposed to real lubricant. I remember your chocolaty member, your manhood, draped in my feces. Man, Robbie, I remember. I was day dreaming, escaping into a nether world where we used to fornicate, and live in fornicatory bliss. You used to like to keep your tubes socks on to enhance they gay look. We were so flitty and light on out feet. I am so very confused these days. I have difficulty conceptualizing the time that was then in contrast to now. I mean, first you were a raging homosexual, now you deprecate me in favor of this "woman." I know that bitch is a transvestite. You are closeting your homosexuality and denying your roots in my ass!
Don't be fooled! This man knows how to suck a dick. He may nibble, and bite, and pretend to be sheepish at first, but deep down this cock loving acolyte of shaft licks cock like a bar maid.
I am destabilizing. The world is going dark to me. I have scintillating threads of motley thoughts, my ability to control my self evanesces away! I have only an adamantine desire to see your balloon knot once again, and to have you ravage mine! I see a world of GOATS. A goat fucking extravaganza. I invoke the ANUS of DOOM! I hate Taco.
SON of the GOAT, HUGE ASS WIDENER, This is a massive, massive ass attack from the Minister of Goat, Ayatollah man-meat.
Dilated Meat Pie. Most suppressed people really like seeing this. It gives them new masturbatory fodder.
Two cucumbers, better than one. This is to show that the giver is really smaller than what is needed to fill GOATSE man. He east Cheerioatse brand O's
A Disney product right where it belongs. Up a goat's ass. Death to Mike Eisner, the butt buddy of Commander Tak0.
Raw and dilated man-pussy. Put back the trouser snake, Tako. You dick is way too small for this man's ass.
A Prolapsed rectum is sure to whet even the most jaded flaming fuck's appetite. Tak0, your penis is regrettably way too small, even for your "Fiancée's" unfettered anus. She doesn't want to dirty her ass with the likes of your pathetic member.
GOAT KORAN
Classic HIT ME IN THE SHITTER BABY, UNGH HUH
Classic Oh yeah, in the shitter some more, in the shitter.
Classic More ass stretching goodness.
Female Goater My pussy is too small for this APPLE.
Goatse Grandpas - GRANPA GOAT S3X0R5
Son of a Goat - Holy fucking son of a goat. Kind of looks like Tako from behind, but to be sure I'd have to ask CowGryl Kneel
1 Oh, pardon me sir, would you happen to have any ANAL LUBE?
2 UNGH FART, pssssbt, ungh, tweeep, squeaaaaaak ungh
3 PFFFFFFFFFFT AHH pffft
4 FOOOOOOOOOOOOF blud dribble dribble
Prime Number Shitting Goatse Man See The Prime numbers flow like the river SHIT
Goatse Returns! Fuck yeah, the goat man is a coming back to Trollaxor
I summon the powers of HUGE GAPING ASS!
The plural of virus is viruses.
So, which is it? A method to kill bacteria or a method to kill viruses? You know the two are *totally different things*, right?!?!?!
There is no cure for any virus. Never has been, and imo, there won't be in our lifetimes. The best thing we can do is bolster the human immune system before infection (vaccine) or after infection (ranging from simply getting rest to AZT cocktails that always remind me of Milkplus from A Clockwork Orange).
Bacteria, however, can be beaten with a wide varity of medicines, from that trusty old blue moldy favorite, penecillin, to modern antibiotics.
Now repeat after me: Anthrax is a bacteria. This article is about using virus style or derived tools to kill a bacteria. It has nothing to do with combatting viruses (or as you put it, virii). The two are totally different biological forms, like tapeworms and right whales.
Arugh! Even CNN and AP can't get it right, so maybe I should be more forgiving. Maybe I should just blithely lump dogs, cats, sofas and trees into the same generic category and not worry about any sort of technical consideration, especially in a friggin' scientific article submission!!!
Thank you, I have now vented. Bacteria != Viruses.
--
Evan (no reference)
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
The human body is an ecosystem.
Bad things happen when you introduce foreign living things into an ecosystem.
A significant lesson could be learned from examining what the Cane Toad did to Australia as a good example of what happens when you do this.
best web host ever
... Look into Amantadine or its ilk, which are effective drugs for the treatment of influenza.
There aren't many antiviral drugs, and the ones we have are not especially effective, but it's incorrect to say antivirals don't exist.
I thought Anthrax pretty much died off in the 80's along with the rest of those thrash metal bands.
Sections in this document:
- English Inflections
- Classical Inflections and References
- Journey Into the Fourth Declension (new)
- Other Latin Resources
- ASM News
- ASM News Update (new)
- Footnotes
English Inflections First off, the OED gives nothing but viruses for the plural. Here's its abbreviated entry: Other sources that support viruses include Birchfield (n FowlerThe simple answer is that there wasn't one. The longer answer follows.
Writers who, searching for a fancy plural to virus, incorrectly write *viri are doubtless blindly applying an overreaching -us => -i rule. This mis-inflects many words. For example, status and hiatus only change the length of the final vowel; genus goes to genera; corpus goes to corpora. Others are even worse if this rule is mis-applied, like syllabus, caucus, octopus, mandamus, and rebus.
Anyway, Latin already had a word viri, but it was the nominative plural not of virus (slime, poison, or venom), but of vir (man), which as it turns out is also a 2nd declension noun. I do not believe that writers of English who write viri are intentionally speaking of men. And although there actually is a viri form for virus, it's the genitive singular[1], not the nominative plural. And we certainly don't grab for genitive singulars for the plurals when we've started out with a nominative. Such hanky panky would certainly get you talked about, and probably your hand slapped as well.
This apparently invariant use of virus as a genitive singular may also imply that it's 4th declension, as some scholars believe.
Those confused souls who write *virii are tacitly positing the existence of the non-word *virius, and declining it as though it were like filius. It's true that l/r are both linguals that sometimes get interchanged, and that f/v are just a change in voicing[2], but that's just reaching. *Virii is still completely silly, so don't do that; otherwise, everyone will know you're just a blathering script kiddie.
The crucial problem here is that, classically speaking, there appears to be no recorded use of virus in the plural. It was a 2nd declension noun ending in -us, which is rather common, but it was also a neuter, which is rather rare. I could only come up with three such 2nd declension neuters: virus (some poison), pelagus (the sea, usually poetically), and vulgus (the crowd). None appear to admit plurals. Perhaps this is because they are mass nouns, not count nouns. [3]
One citation below wonders whether these -us 2nd declension neuters might have inflected -us => -ora, the way the 3rd declension's neuter plurals for tempus and corpus do. There's really not any support for that notion--that I could find at least. If so, that would end up producing *virora. Most other citations think that these plurals just never happened at all, or that if they did, they didn't jump declensions. Perhaps they were invariant as they oddly are for the vocative and accusative cases. In any event, *virora does not fit comfortably in the mouth of an English speaker, which is a good reason to avoid it.[4]
Another theory holds that virus, if it was a 2nd declension neuter, must go to *vira in the plural as do its -um neuter brethren in the 2nd declension. However, that assumes that it works like a -um form, not as a -us form does. And it really seems to do neither. If it were a -us form (again, as a 2nd declension nominative), then its vocative would have to be *vire; but it's really only virus. You also expect an accusative form *viros, but that too is missing; it's still just virus in the accusative. And if it were a -um form, then its vocative would have to be *virum. But it's not--here again, it's only virus. (Vocative examples of virus are not particularly common. Apparently the Romans seldom addressed their slime in a personal fashion. :-)
So what we have here is something of a mixed or invariant declension. Trying to find a plural for something that didn't take a plural (possibly because it was not a count but a mass noun), or at least, one for which no plural is classically attested, is a fruitless endeavour. Best to stick with English and use viruses. Journey Into the Fourth Declension Some scholars, includining Gavin Betts, believe that virus pertained not to the second declension, but to the fourth one. Here is an example or two that support[5] Betts and dispute the 2nd declension theory. The first is classical, from Ammianus:
That seems to be using virus as a genitive, which contradicts the assertion that it's 2nd declension, which would have lead to viri, and supports the 4th declension position. This was brought to my attention by Andreas Waschbuesch, who went on to write: This recent letter also supports the fourth declension point of view. Of course, even if virus really turns out to have been in the fourth declension, we'll still have vulgus, pelagus, and cetus as irregular -us neuters in the second declension. Let's blame it all on the Greeks. ReferencesHere's what other sources have to say about this matter:
alt.usage.english FAQ Not all Latin words ending in -us had plurals in -i. Apparatus, cantus, coitus, hiatus, impetus, Jesus, nexus, plexus, prospectus, and status were 4th declension in Latin, and had plurals in -us with a long `u'. Corpus, genus, and opus were 3rd declension, with plurals corpora, genera, and opera. Virus is not attested in the plural in Latin, and is of a rare form (2nd declension neuter in -us) that makes it debatable what the Latin plural would have been; the only plural in English is viruses. Omnibus and rebus were not nominative nouns in Latin. Ignoramus was not a noun in Latin.
[...] classical plurals [...] What is the plural of virus? This neuter in Latin lacked a plural; it would presumably [disputable -tchrist ] have been virora like corpora, the plural of neuter corpus. (Like corpora, virora would be stressed on its initial syllable. As indicated earlier, *corpi would be as outlandish--as far beyond the pale--as *rhinoceri and *octopi.)
Latin had several declensions containing neuter, feminine, and masculine words ending in -us; the plurals are different in each one. Incidentally, the singular of mores (pronounced `moh-rehs') is mos, with the same change of `s' to `r' between vowels heard in corpus : corpora and in genus : genera.
Allen and Greenough The authors at the cited reference point out the follwoing:
Whether this leading would lead to ?vire, however, is unclear, since virus does not appear to be of Greek extraction.Latin inflections And for those who just can't get enough, try this. It is a bunch of inflection tables, more complete than I've seen elsewhere. For a good time, figure out the nominative plural of venus is. Hint: it's not veni. ASM News Apparently this question is `in the air'. The following is from the June 1999 issue of ASM News by the American Society for Microbiology, sent it by Jim Sandoz.
ASM News Update The following letter recently appeared in ASM News, from Ton E. van den Bogaard. (Formatting added.)
Other Latin Resources One textbook I'd like to recommend Gavin Betts's Teach Yourself Latin, which you can look up on Amazon if you'd like. No, I don't believe in kickbacks.Here are some Web resources: The Perseus Project Read Caesar, Catullus, Cicero, Hirtius, Horace, Livy, Ovid, Plautus, Servius, and Vergil, plus quite a bit of other useful material. For example, you can look up virus for a definition and forms, or find its citations in literature. Here's one by Vergil.
Latin Textbook: Wheelock's Latin (HTML) Wonderful on-line course notes designed as a study aid for those without formal grammar/linguistics training. Note that `the entire zip archive' he advertises isn't really complete, and so I used these commands to pull in and view the whole thing locally: % cd /tmp
% wget -r -l2 http://humanum.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/Lexis/Wheelock-Lat in/
% netscape /tmp/humanum.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/Lexis/Wheelock-Latin /index.html
The Classics Page Innumerable links, including some to on-line interactive exercises and to various dictionaries.
Transcriptio Nuntiorum Hebdomadalis Read your daily news--in Latin! Also contains sound files for the radio version whence it was transcribed. I'm sure glad that we now write FAQ instead of interrogata usitatissima. :-)
De Meditatione Various Latin snippets and sound clips. Footnotes [1] One examble of an invariant genitive form of virus is attested in Ammianus, which reads: qui ut coluber copia virus exuberans natorum. See the original for details. [2] Well, in English; in Latin it probably wasn't, as their `v' was likely more akin to the intervocalic `v' in today's Spanish, a sound with no equivalent in English but which is often perceived as a `w'. To be even more technical, an English `v' is a voiced labial-dental fricative. An intervocalic Spanish `v' (or `b') such as in aves, is a voiced bilabial fricative, usually represented in IPA as a lower-case Greek beta. [3] Some budding Romance philologist should go research a possible connection between the neuter conceptual nouns versus the gendered discrete ones in asturianu , the only extant Romance tongue with anything aproximating neuter nouns (I'm not counting the nominalized adjectives of Spanish such as lo difcil, since these aren't really nouns the way the so-called nomes de xneru neutru (de materia) are in asturianu.) a [4] The word virora actually appears to exist, but as some sort of South American tree. [5] Yes, I hated this sentence, too. It takes the singular verb "is" because the singular "an example" is the closer of the two elements in the disjunction, but likewise, "support" should be in the plural because the closer thing to it is now "two", which is obviously nonsingular. I think only a rewrite would be tolerable. Silly rules.
Sections in this document:
piss@fuck.com Last update: Wed Nov 17 09:20:10 MST 1969
But then you will probably have a reaction to the bacteria.
Sooooo then they will give you a drug to fight the reaction.
But then the drug will cause strange side effects.
They will give you other drugs to fight the effects of the side effects.
Thus giving you MORE side effects. (I am beginning to see a nasty pattern here...)
So then you will probably get sick of this and try herbal remedies to ease the side effects.
That won't work so you will take up drinking which will destroy you liver and give you heart disease...
This will necessitate MORE drugs.
(Repeat previous steps.)
In the end you will still die anyways...
At least it will keep you busy on the way though, eh?
Some bright guy might attempt to engineer a broad spectrum bacteriophage, which would, of course, shut down our entire foodchain.
That would be bad.
If I was George W., I'd be much more concerned about stuff like this emanating from Iraq than nasty gasses and stuff.
After all, we're talking Doomsday weapon here...
Total climate change, and utter devastation with but one tiny twiddle of a genetic code.
I pray that these guys have thought this through..
Brak: What's THAT?
Thundercleese: A light switch.. of TOTAL DEVASTATION!
Of course it's spelled right. When in doubt, consult this handy chart:
SINGLE PLURAL
bonus bonii
bus bii
campus campii
chorus chorii
genius geniii
plus plii
virus virii
walrus walrii
Human/Ranger/Zangband
Sections in this document:
- English Inflections
- Classical Inflections and References
- Journey Into the Fourth Declension (new)
- Other Latin Resources
- ASM News
- ASM News Update (new)
- Footnotes
English Inflections First off, the OED gives nothing but viruses for the plural. Here's its abbreviated entry: Other sources that support viruses include Birchfield (n FowlerThe simple answer is that there wasn't one. The longer answer follows.
Writers who, searching for a fancy plural to virus, incorrectly write *viri are doubtless blindly applying an overreaching -us => -i rule. This mis-inflects many words. For example, status and hiatus only change the length of the final vowel; genus goes to genera; corpus goes to corpora. Others are even worse if this rule is mis-applied, like syllabus, caucus, octopus, mandamus, and rebus.
Anyway, Latin already had a word viri, but it was the nominative plural not of virus (slime, poison, or venom), but of vir (man), which as it turns out is also a 2nd declension noun. I do not believe that writers of English who write viri are intentionally speaking of men. And although there actually is a viri form for virus, it's the genitive singular[1], not the nominative plural. And we certainly don't grab for genitive singulars for the plurals when we've started out with a nominative. Such hanky panky would certainly get you talked about, and probably your hand slapped as well.
This apparently invariant use of virus as a genitive singular may also imply that it's 4th declension, as some scholars believe.
Those confused souls who write *virii are tacitly positing the existence of the non-word *virius, and declining it as though it were like filius. It's true that l/r are both linguals that sometimes get interchanged, and that f/v are just a change in voicing[2], but that's just reaching. *Virii is still completely silly, so don't do that; otherwise, everyone will know you're just a blathering script kiddie.
The crucial problem here is that, classically speaking, there appears to be no recorded use of virus in the plural. It was a 2nd declension noun ending in -us, which is rather common, but it was also a neuter, which is rather rare. I could only come up with three such 2nd declension neuters: virus (some poison), pelagus (the sea, usually poetically), and vulgus (the crowd). None appear to admit plurals. Perhaps this is because they are mass nouns, not count nouns. [3]
One citation below wonders whether these -us 2nd declension neuters might have inflected -us => -ora, the way the 3rd declension's neuter plurals for tempus and corpus do. There's really not any support for that notion--that I could find at least. If so, that would end up producing *virora. Most other citations think that these plurals just never happened at all, or that if they did, they didn't jump declensions. Perhaps they were invariant as they oddly are for the vocative and accusative cases. In any event, *virora does not fit comfortably in the mouth of an English speaker, which is a good reason to avoid it.[4]
Another theory holds that virus, if it was a 2nd declension neuter, must go to *vira in the plural as do its -um neuter brethren in the 2nd declension. However, that assumes that it works like a -um form, not as a -us form does. And it really seems to do neither. If it were a -us form (again, as a 2nd declension nominative), then its vocative would have to be *vire; but it's really only virus. You also expect an accusative form *viros, but that too is missing; it's still just virus in the accusative. And if it were a -um form, then its vocative would have to be *virum. But it's not--here again, it's only virus. (Vocative examples of virus are not particularly common. Apparently the Romans seldom addressed their slime in a personal fashion. :-)
So what we have here is something of a mixed or invariant declension. Trying to find a plural for something that didn't take a plural (possibly because it was not a count but a mass noun), or at least, one for which no plural is classically attested, is a fruitless endeavour. Best to stick with English and use viruses. Journey Into the Fourth Declension Some scholars, includining Gavin Betts, believe that virus pertained not to the second declension, but to the fourth one. Here is an example or two that support[5] Betts and dispute the 2nd declension theory. The first is classical, from Ammianus:
That seems to be using virus as a genitive, which contradicts the assertion that it's 2nd declension, which would have lead to viri, and supports the 4th declension position. This was brought to my attention by Andreas Waschbuesch, who went on to write: This recent letter also supports the fourth declension point of view. Of course, even if virus really turns out to have been in the fourth declension, we'll still have vulgus, pelagus, and cetus as irregular -us neuters in the second declension. Let's blame it all on the Greeks. ReferencesHere's what other sources have to say about this matter:
alt.usage.english FAQ Not all Latin words ending in -us had plurals in -i. Apparatus, cantus, coitus, hiatus, impetus, Jesus, nexus, plexus, prospectus, and status were 4th declension in Latin, and had plurals in -us with a long `u'. Corpus, genus, and opus were 3rd declension, with plurals corpora, genera, and opera. Virus is not attested in the plural in Latin, and is of a rare form (2nd declension neuter in -us) that makes it debatable what the Latin plural would have been; the only plural in English is viruses. Omnibus and rebus were not nominative nouns in Latin. Ignoramus was not a noun in Latin.
[...] classical plurals [...] What is the plural of virus? This neuter in Latin lacked a plural; it would presumably [disputable -tchrist ] have been virora like corpora, the plural of neuter corpus. (Like corpora, virora would be stressed on its initial syllable. As indicated earlier, *corpi would be as outlandish--as far beyond the pale--as *rhinoceri and *octopi.)
Latin had several declensions containing neuter, feminine, and masculine words ending in -us; the plurals are different in each one. Incidentally, the singular of mores (pronounced `moh-rehs') is mos, with the same change of `s' to `r' between vowels heard in corpus : corpora and in genus : genera.
Allen and Greenough The authors at the cited reference point out the follwoing:
Whether this leading would lead to ?vire, however, is unclear, since virus does not appear to be of Greek extraction.Latin inflections And for those who just can't get enough, try this. It is a bunch of inflection tables, more complete than I've seen elsewhere. For a good time, figure out the nominative plural of venus is. Hint: it's not veni. ASM News Apparently this question is `in the air'. The following is from the June 1999 issue of ASM News by the American Society for Microbiology, sent it by Jim Sandoz.
ASM News Update The following letter recently appeared in ASM News, from Ton E. van den Bogaard. (Formatting added.)
Other Latin Resources One textbook I'd like to recommend Gavin Betts's Teach Yourself Latin, which you can look up on Amazon if you'd like. No, I don't believe in kickbacks.Here are some Web resources: The Perseus Project Read Caesar, Catullus, Cicero, Hirtius, Horace, Livy, Ovid, Plautus, Servius, and Vergil, plus quite a bit of other useful material. For example, you can look up virus for a definition and forms, or find its citations in literature. Here's one by Vergil.
Latin Textbook: Wheelock's Latin (HTML) Wonderful on-line course notes designed as a study aid for those without formal grammar/linguistics training. Note that `the entire zip archive' he advertises isn't really complete, and so I used these commands to pull in and view the whole thing locally: % cd /tmp
% wget -r -l2 http://humanum.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/Lexis/Wheelock-Lat in/
% netscape /tmp/humanum.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/Lexis/Wheelock-Latin /index.html
The Classics Page Innumerable links, including some to on-line interactive exercises and to various dictionaries.
Transcriptio Nuntiorum Hebdomadalis Read your daily news--in Latin! Also contains sound files for the radio version whence it was transcribed. I'm sure glad that we now write FAQ instead of interrogata usitatissima. :-)
De Meditatione Various Latin snippets and sound clips. Footnotes [1] One examble of an invariant genitive form of virus is attested in Ammianus, which reads: qui ut coluber copia virus exuberans natorum. See the original for details. [2] Well, in English; in Latin it probably wasn't, as their `v' was likely more akin to the intervocalic `v' in today's Spanish, a sound with no equivalent in English but which is often perceived as a `w'. To be even more technical, an English `v' is a voiced labial-dental fricative. An intervocalic Spanish `v' (or `b') such as in aves, is a voiced bilabial fricative, usually represented in IPA as a lower-case Greek beta. [3] Some budding Romance philologist should go research a possible connection between the neuter conceptual nouns versus the gendered discrete ones in asturianu , the only extant Romance tongue with anything aproximating neuter nouns (I'm not counting the nominalized adjectives of Spanish such as lo difcil, since these aren't really nouns the way the so-called nomes de xneru neutru (de materia) are in asturianu.) a [4] The word virora actually appears to exist, but as some sort of South American tree. [5] Yes, I hated this sentence, too. It takes the singular verb "is" because the singular "an example" is the closer of the two elements in the disjunction, but likewise, "support" should be in the plural because the closer thing to it is now "two", which is obviously nonsingular. I think only a rewrite would be tolerable. Silly rules.
Sections in this document:
What's interesting to note is that, in addition to fighting the anthrax itself, this method is also useful in detecting the spores (below is a snippet of the article which wasn't mentioned in the article summary...it's all in the yahoo! article link):
Fischetti said that the enzyme had another potential use: detection of small numbers of anthrax spores. When PlyG destroys an anthrax bacterium, the cell releases a substance that can be detected with the help of a fluorescent agent and a hand-held device.
Biology and Pharmacology being weak points for me, can somebody briefly (is that possible?) explain how these viruses know the difference between bad bacteria and good bacteria or any other good cell in the human body? Also, is there a chance that there is a necessary bacteria we don't know about in the human body that could be destroyed with this virus creating even worse problems than Anthrax? It appears that this particular application using PlyG is Anthrax-specific, but as they expand this techonolgy, I wonder about strange reactions, especially considering what somebody else said about viruses never leaving the human body.
To combat Winger and Poison!
heheheh shut up beavis.. Anthrax rocks
If you have a subscription to Nature, you can get a rather more accurate summary in this News and Views piece.
The research article itself is here.
the original article would help, or perhaps carefully reading the original post. The poster is incorrect about spelling the plural of "virus" as "virii" but did accurately restate from the article that The method uses an enzyme from bacteriophages, virii which attack bacteria. .
Ignoring the spelling blunder, the poster has offered a portion the original article's gist. There was no mix-up of bacteria and viruses.
------ The only greater hazard to your liberty than n politicians is n+1 politicians.
I just iron all my mail. Use a trouser press if you have loads.
If it's from a government agency I also make a point of chucking it in the microwave just to take care of any nanotech surveilance devices. I'm serious about stopping "them" tracking me in any way!
I've made a mess of more than a few credit/debit/store cards though. :(
Ali
Ph33r m3!!!
you mean that there is new way to destroy my anthrax.ds.pg.gda.pl? Please not, it's very peaceful pentium 90 with 80GiB of discs...
:wq
> There is no cure for any virus.
:-)
norton antivirus seems to work well for me.
Whoever modded the parent down as a troll is a complete idiot.
...to ship it via UPS, instead of using the US Mail.
Scientists at Rockefeller University in New York announced today in the journal Nature that a protein used by a bacteriophage (a virus that kills bacteria) can be used to quickly detect and kill anthrax. Last year, it took days to check a building for anthrax spores, but this method of causing the bacteria's cell wall to burst and yield an easily-detectible dye would cut the uncertainty to a period of minutes. It can also be used in a drug to kill strains of anthrax that have grown resistant to antibiotics. Rockefeller University has additional info, and the NYTimes has an article.
The Nature article also mentions an interesting tidbit about a difference between Western and Russian medicine: "Such 'phage therapy' is routine in Russia - the concept is over 80 years old - but was ousted by antibiotics in the West." A nice reminder that ignoring one approach in favor of another can have disastrous results."