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Associated media - Associated media As they travel, farm animals can also leave pathogens in their wake. In one study, scientists found that disease-causing bacteria, including some that were resistant to antibiotics, flowed off moving poultry trucks and into the cars behind them. The trucks were “just disseminating these antibiotic-resistant bacteria,” said Ana Rule, an expert on bioaerosols at Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health and an author of the study. Contaminated transport vehicles have also been known to spread pathogens long after the infected animals have disembarked and may be playing a role in the dairy cow…

Connected media - Associated media As he lay on his deathbed, his publisher gave him a gift of 12 bottles of wine. By then Beethoven knew he could never drink them. He whispered his last recorded words: “Pity, pity — too late!” For a composer, deafness had been perhaps the worst affliction. At age 30, 26 years before his death, Beethoven wrote: “For almost 2 years I have ceased to attend any social functions, just because I find it impossible to say to people: I am deaf. If I had any other profession, I might be able to cope with…

Associated media - Connected media Mr. Bouton said that he had not been aware of the full extent of Dr. Oxnam’s alcoholism and that he had had inklings about his behavioral problems. He said that it was remarkable that Dr. Oxnam had been able to work through them. But in 1992, Dr. Oxnam told the society’s board that he was going to resign. “The Bob part of me was touched that they pressured me to reconsider,” he wrote in his book. But he left. In addition to his wife, whom he married in 1993 and who was president of the…

Connected media - Associated media The loss of biodiversity played an especially large role in driving up disease risk, the researchers found. Many scientists have posited that biodiversity can protect against disease through a phenomenon known as the dilution effect. The theory holds that parasites and pathogens, which rely on having abundant hosts in order to survive, will evolve to favor species that are common, rather than those that are rare, Dr. Rohr said. And as biodiversity declines, rare species tend to disappear first. “That means that the species that remain are the competent ones, the ones that are really…

Connected media - Connected media Dr. Clinton White, a professor of infectious diseases at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, said microscopic tapeworm eggs are sticky and easily transferred from one person to another. Once hatched, the larvae can travel in the bloodstream, he said, “and end up in all kinds of tissues.” Though it is impossible to know, he added that it is unlikely that a parasite would eat a part of the brain, as Mr. Kennedy described. Rather, Dr. White said, it survives on nutrients from the body. Unlike tapeworm larvae in the intestines, those in…