Saturday, February 11, 2012
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Pathogens & People: Pathogens, as with people, come in all shapes and sizes

Capital Gazette Communications
Published 10/05/08

So, naturalists observe, a flea
Has smaller fleas that on him prey;
And these have smaller still to bite 'em,

And so proceed ad infinitum.


 

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These lines from Jonathan Swift's classic poem, ''a Rhapsody,'' about how the little are eaten by the big and the big by the bigger is a rule of nature that also applies in the very small world of microorganisms. You might not think microbes have a lot of size variation, but they do, and size matters. It determines who infects whom.

Let's look at the scale of small things. Our red blood cells are about 10 micrometers...

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