Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. Any of various bacteria of the genus Rickettsia, carried as parasites by many ticks, fleas, and lice, that cause diseases such as typhus, scrub typhus, and Rocky Mountain spotted fever in humans.
Wiktionary
- n. Any of a group of gram-negative bacteria, of the genus Rickettsia, carried as parasites by ticks, fleas and lice; they cause typhus and other diseases
WordNet 3.0
- n. any of a group of very small rod-shaped bacteria that live in biting arthropods (as ticks and mites) and cause disease in vertebrate hosts; they cause typhus and other febrile diseases in human beings
Etymologies
- From Rickettsia (genus name) (Wiktionary)
- New Latin Rickettsia, genus name, after Howard Taylor Ricketts (1871-1910), American pathologist. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)
Examples
“But Infante said the Chilean salmon industry relied on the drugs to fight a particular bacteria, rickettsia, which is carried by sea lice and has long plagued the industry.”
“After bacteria I will be doing either viruses, rickettsia, fungi or parasites.”
“DESCRIPTION: An infection occurs when the body as a whole or in part is invaded by a pathogenic agent such as a bacteria, virus, parasite, fungi, or rickettsia microorganisms originating from arthropods such as lice, fleas, mosquitoes, or ticks.”
“It was presumed to be due to a virus, and as Australia's only recognized virologist, material from guinea pigs was sent down to him. 8 On histological examination of tissues from an infected mouse he noticed a "vague herringbone pattern" which recalled what he had seen in psittacosis and had read about for rickettsiae, and using Castaneda's stain he had no doubt that the organism was a rickettsia.”
“Coypu can carry viruses that result in toxoplasmosis, papillomatosis, rabies, and equine encephalomyelitis; bacteria that cause salmonellosis, paratyphoid, and leptospirosis; protozoans that produce sarcosporidiosis and coccidiosis; and rickettsia.”
“It was originally thought to be rinderpest; it is now believed to be caused by a rickettsia transmitted by cattle ticks.”
“Sergent (from Algiers) was the first to describe inclusion bodies, later called rickettsia, in the intestinal cells and faeces of the louse.”
“Studies suggest it may take several hours or even days for infected ticks to transmit the rickettsia bacteria, that causes infection.”
“Men, meanwhile, had higher risks of fever, including from infections transmitted by mosquitoes, ticks or other such "vectors," such as malaria, dengue and rickettsia.”
“The assay will be a useful tool for differential diagnosis of dengue fever in a situation where a number of other clinically indistinguishable infectious diseases like malaria, chikungunya, rickettsia and leptospira occur.”
Lists
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Learned (or Encountered) in Reading
I have a list for words learned from Newsweek; here's where I keep all the stuff from other shit I read.
Except when I'm looking stuff up and find new words that way. Those go on their...cellie, laminectomy, mridangam, terroir, hypospadias, crus, corpora cavernosa, crura, uretheral meatus, bartholin's gland, coloquintida, colopexy and 921 more...
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cschx's Words
endianness, oneiric, hypnerotomachia, manumit, basilisk, fata morgana, paradichlorobenzene, duodenum, antepenultimate, psychic antimagician, triboluminescence, fractoluminescence and 44 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for rickettsia.
chained_bear "The doctors in the ER thought it could be rickettsial disease, a term that covers a number of infections caused by vectors like ticks, fleas, or contact with animals. Most rickettsia can be controlled with antibiotics...."
—Molly Caldwell Crosby, The American Plague (New York: Berkeley Books, 2006), 211 Oct 6, 2008