Families and entire communities feel the impact when disease-causing bacteria become resistant to antibiotics.
All known disease-causing bacteria, viruses and parasites produced symptoms within days or weeks.
Before the water is released into the East River, chlorine is added to kill any disease-causing bacteria.
In addition, poultry often supports the growth of certain pathogenic (disease-causing) bacteria, such as Salmonella.
The trouble, scientists report, is that suburban and rural home development causes fragmentation of forests, fostering a population explosion among white-footed mice, the main carrier of the disease-causing bacteria.
The ability to acquire iron in this way is particularly important to pathogenic (disease-causing) bacteria, which must compete with their host for iron.
When doctors discovered antibiotics, they expected to catch disease-causing bacteria off guard.
Similar trends of human-induced evolution are also observed in bacteria when inefficient use of antibiotics drives evolution, making human disease-causing bacteria resistant to many antibiotics.
Though the authors acknowledge most of it is harmless, they did identify 67 species of disease-causing bacteria.
