PIGMY BACTERIA
MATTER OF IDENTIFICATION. The discovery of bacteria and their constant (relationship with various septic and infectious conditions was one of the epochal events in the progress of medicine. It was followed by the identification of specific bacteria with certain particular diseases, such as tuberculosis, diphtheria, typhoid fever, anthrax, tetanus or lock-jaw, and many others. There were many conditions, however, of which neither the filter nor the microscope could demonstrate the probable agent. Recent researches have gone to show that many of these conditions, including influenza, the common cold, measles, and foot-and-mouth disease in animals, are, in fact, caused by extremely minute, submicroscopal bodies that are able tr. pass through any ordinary filter. These aro termed viruses, and there has been, and is still, some dispute as to whether they are living and reproducing organisms or merely minute particles resulting from and shed, as it were, hy diseased cells. It may he said 1 at onco that the majority of workers in this field hold—and in his recent Huxley Memorial lecture ( Sir Henry Dale supports this view—that they are living independent organisms.
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Ashburton Guardian, Volume 55, Issue 241, 25 July 1935, Page 6
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183PIGMY BACTERIA Ashburton Guardian, Volume 55, Issue 241, 25 July 1935, Page 6
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