
Bacteria can travel thousands of miles through the air on their own - gscott
https://www.earth.com/news/bacteria-travel-thousands-miles/#.XJq0byhKiUl
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FTA
Link to the actual study (which the article never provides):
[https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2018.009...](https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2018.0092)

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kenjackson
The evidence seems super speculative to me. Is there anything else to
corroborate this?

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marshray
Fine dust gets lofted high in the atmosphere. Some bacteria can handle being
dried out for long periods and act as fine particles. As I recall, one of the
victims of the anthrax terror attacks was a woman who lived several miles
downwind of an affected Post Office.

But good for these researchers for working out the details, and I'm sure
there's a lot more in the paper that didn't make it into the article.

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steve19
Is one bacteria landing on your tongue, being sucked up your nose or inhaled
into your lungs going to do anything? Are there any bacteria and virus that
can kill with just one making contact?

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k_sze
It’s called “infectious dose”, and it’s largely about probabilities.

See this question that I asked a while ago (and associated answers) on Biology
SE: [https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/5442/are-all-
kno...](https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/5442/are-all-known-germs-
benign-in-small-enough-quantities-i-e-why-do-we-wash-our-h)

EDIT: added missing URL.

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Symmetry
Apparently for Anthrax the LD1, the dose expected to kill 1% of the population
exposed to it, is just 1 to 3 spores. So it's possisble that woman downwind of
the post office might have just inhaled a single spore.

[http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/infectious-disease-
topics/anthrax](http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/infectious-disease-topics/anthrax)

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biggestlou
*on their own

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codenut
I believe the title is grammatically correct.

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tlb
Garner's Modern English Usage recommends the plural form, and cites a 7:1
current usage ratio in favor of plural.

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codenut
Thats interesting. I did not know about that. Can you post the URL of the
source?

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tlb
Sadly, it's not online that I know of. Here are pictures of the text:

[https://www.dropbox.com/s/5sa0m8l9u6211y4/2019-03-26%2019.21...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/5sa0m8l9u6211y4/2019-03-26%2019.21.53.jpg?dl=0)
[https://www.dropbox.com/s/dwbh9i7a4dcx84g/2019-03-26%2019.22...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/dwbh9i7a4dcx84g/2019-03-26%2019.22.08.jpg?dl=0)

The book [[https://www.amazon.com/Garners-Modern-English-Usage-
Garner/d...](https://www.amazon.com/Garners-Modern-English-Usage-
Garner/dp/0190491485)] is worth owning.

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dwringer
Although based on that book, with which I agree here, the plural seems
unambiguously the preferred term for this article's context, I'm not convinced
of the book's examples of incorrect use of the singular form. It seems like in
the given examples, the word "bacteria" is treated as singular when referring
to a specific _strain_ of bacteria. It seems unwieldy in referring to one
particular strain, IMHO, to say "the bacterium that causes <x>", since one
typically gets infected by a vast quantity of the individual entities, not
just one. Thus I think "the [strain of] bacteria that causes ..." [for one
strain] sounds just as natural as "bacteria that cause <x> include <a>, <b>,
<c> ..." [referring to multiple strains].

