Re:Bacteria that can live for decades and kill 70% of infect...
by pmiller2 on Wednesday March 01, 2017 @05:08AM
(#13762623)
I agree that the part about surviving for "decades" is clickbait-y, as they only showed it would last 16 years, but if it can:
* Survive for 16 years in distilled water,
* Infect humans and non-human animals,
* Feed off of amoebas,
* And potentially survive in the wild in the US,
as the article claims, then that is one badass microbe. It's the combination of all these things that makes this bug a bit frightening, even if the overall risk is fairly low. Even the combination of pathogenicity in mammals with being able to feed off of (I'm assuming they mean 'infect' when they say that) amoebas is rather unusual, AFAIK, although I'm not a biologist.
* Survive for 16 years in distilled water,
* Infect humans and non-human animals,
* Feed off of amoebas,
* And potentially survive in the wild in the US,
as the article claims, then that is one badass microbe. It's the combination of all these things that makes this bug a bit frightening, even if the overall risk is fairly low. Even the combination of pathogenicity in mammals with being able to feed off of (I'm assuming they mean 'infect' when they say that) amoebas is rather unusual, AFAIK, although I'm not a biologist.