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.They pervade all aspects of life.The same applies to magazine, newspaper, newsletter, and online publication readers.There are vital issues involving contemporary science that never existed before.Most, in fact, were not even in the minds of our best scientists a generation or two ago.Few people could have anticipated a medical problem such as AIDS, for example.The first mainframe computer was developed 50 years and desktop personal computers are still less than a generation old.Manned aviation itself is less than 100 years old.It would have been hard for most scientists in the early 1940s to imagine an energy source that could be as inexpensive or as dangerous as nuclear power.The list of these types of recent major scientific developments is endless.It is one of the news media's most important duties to provide the latest science and technology information to those who live in our communities.Certainly, reporting about new developments that are lifeÂsaving techniques, or simply just time savings, can be particularly satisfying for science feature writers."Writing technical articles is not only easy, but surprisingly enjoyable," notes high tech freelance writer Angela D.Mitchell (1997, p.37)."Your market is huge—you'll be able to submit your pieces to magazines on the local, regional, and national level, and you'll sometimes get a look at prodÂPage 410ucts far before most consumers will.You'll develop an enhanced appreciation for the everÂchanging world of technological innovations."Staff writer Mike Toner (1992) of the Atlanta Constitution wrote a startling sixÂpart "occasional" series about the diminishing effects of pesticides and antibiotics entitled "When Bugs Fight Back." Explaining how insects develop resistance to chemicals in the human effort to eradicate them, Toner was able to teach readers about the science behind such work by making a complicated topic involving chemistry and biology easy to understand.He interviewed dozens of scientists and other experts.Toner illustrated the problem with numerous actual medical cases and examples.He discussed the problem by reviewing its history and development.Toner's efforts earned him the Pulitzer Prize for explanatory journalism in 1993 and the JC Penney—University of Missouri Newspaper Feature Writing Awards certificate of merit for a series.This is the first part, a 3,300Âword installment, in Toner's highly enlightening series: Editor's Note: The bugs are fighting back.And they are getting very good at it.The world's simplest creatures—bacteria, viruses, insects and weeds—are unraveling the chemical security blanket that has nurtured a halfÂcentury of progress in both public health and agriculture.First in an occasional series, "When Bugs Fight Back."The death certificate attributed the 58ÂyearÂold heart patient's demise to "complications" following bypass surgery.The real reason made even his doctors cringe.Antibiotics didn't work anymore.For four months, doctors at the University of Michigan Medical Center had struggled to control a bacterial infection that had invaded the man's chest cavity.The germs, however, were resistant to every available drug.In the end, the bugs triumphed—and doctors at one of the country's premier medical institutions were as powerless to prevent it as doctors were 50 years ago, in the days before penicillin."If he hadn't had such a resistant strain, he would have made it," says Dennis Schaberg, professor of medicine at the University of Michigan medical school in Ann Arbor."I hate to sound like Chicken Little, but with certain microÂorganisms, we are back to a point in time where we have noPage 411options left.It's tough to explain something like that to the family of the patient.Very tough."A growing number of patients—and their families—are discovering a grim new reality of medicine in the 1990s.Antibiotics, those tooÂgoodÂtoÂbeÂtrue compounds that have provided mankind with mastery over infectious disease, don't work like they used to.The bugs are fighting back.And they are getting very good at it.On city streets, in remote jungle clinics, on the farm and in back yards, the world's simplest creatures—bacteria, viruses, insects and weeds—are unraveling the chemical security blanket that has nurtured a halfÂcentury of progress in both public health and agriculture.Whether we are conscious of it or not, the ability of these mindless creatures to adapt to the chemical warfare we wage on them has become a significant force in our daily lives.Look closely at any infectious disease for which there is a cure and you'll find bugs with a cure for the cure.Have a child with an ear infection that won't go away? Deep in the recesses of your toddler's middle ear, there is probably a resistant bug to blame.Having trouble getting rid of Fido's fleas or the cockroaches under your sink? Chances are, they're resistant too.Did your stomach tie itself in knots after your last trip to a restaurant salad bar? If it was food poisoning, chances are one in three that the bug you took home with you was resistant.Like the villains in a lateÂnight horror show, resistant strains of mankind's oldest enemies are finding ways to sabotage our most sophisticated technology.And even the malevolent microbes of "The Andromeda Strain" or the angry hordes of "Killer Bees" aren't as scary as the realÂlife "superbugs" that are now emerging throughout the world.In U.S.hospitals, where most people go to get well, 2 million people a year get sick after they check in—and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) estimates that 60 percent of those infections are now resistant to at least one antibiotic.Because drugÂresistant germs are twice as likely to be fatal, they contribute to 50,000 hospital deaths a year.And because they take twicePage 412as long to cure, they add as much as $30 billion a year to the cost of hospital care.The toll in hospitals, however, is only the most documented facet of an insidious trend.Resistant strains of some of man's oldest enemies—malaria, tuberculosis, gonorrhea, food poisoning, pneumonia, even leprosy—are undermining public health throughout the world.Some new strains of tuberculosis, resurgent after 30 years of decline in the United States and Europe, have become resistant to so many drugs that they are virtually as untreatable as they were before the discovery of antibiotics.Malaria, which claims at least 1 million lives a year in the tropics, is on the comeback trail too, bolstered by the malaria parasite's growing resistance to drugs, and pesticide resistance of the mosquitoes that carry it.Even that familiar nemesis we call pneumonia, which claims more than 3.5 million lives a year worldwide—up to 50,000 of them in the United States—is becoming steadily more resistant to penicillin, which has controlled it for nearly 50 years
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