Corynebacterium diphtheriae & Chinese letters

A comparison of Corynebacterium diphtheriae and real Chinese "letters".
If you can read  the Chinese then you are in for a treat.

Coreynebacterium diphtheriae used to be very common before we started vaccinating for it. In the United States, every child gets the DPT vaccine that protects them from diptheriae, pretussis, and tetanus. When everyone takes it, it's extremely effective. We haven't had a case of it in the United States since 2004.

What is funny about diphtheriae is that the scientists who studied it long ago looked at it under a microscope said that it looks like "Chinese letters". To me, this is funny on many levels, one of the more obvious being that there are no letters in Chinese. They use characters, where each character represents a word. In English, @#$% are examples of characters. Silly, uncultured westerners.




I am a medical student at BCM and all thoughts are my own. I am not a doctor. Please read the disclaimer.
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