Raymond Cooper

Lesson four – What Are Bacteria? Little Lives, Big names Now that we’ve seen what bacteria are and how they multiply, let’s talk about their names. Not in long winded, long worded point headed way, just putting them into simple terms that you and I can understand and use. A lot of these terms come simply from what the bacteria look like under a microscope. Okay, so let’s begin with the word itself, bacteria. It was coined by a German scientist some time around about 1860. It comes from the Greek word baktra and simply means little sticks. Not a bad description when you look at this image. But not all of them are look like piles o rods or sticks, so there was a need to come up with different names for different patterns and features. Let’s take a bacteria that you will have heard of. Salmonella. It’s a word that’s got to be a Greek or Latin right? No. Let’s do this, let’s take away the ella from salmonella. Okay now that we’ve done that, we’re left with salmon, an easy word to say and really nice to have on a bagel Now We’ll do this. Put the word doctor in front of the word salmon and voila. Doctor Salmon. The salmonella bacteria was named after Doctor Salmon back in the early 1900s. It wasn’t discovered by him, but by his colleagues who thought that he was a nice enough sort of a guy to deserve the honour of having it bear his name. So, salmonella the bacteria is something be worried about, but salmonella the word is not something you should be frightened of. And that is the way of it with all the bacteria that we are going to talk about in this course. Now, what about this one? Eschericia Coli – discovered in 1885 by Doctor Escheric and named after him. It really is a mouthful, so the general way of talking about this bacteria is by doing this: Take away the hard bit and just call it E coli. The coli bit? That simply means that this bacteria is mainly found in the colon of the human body. E Coli. Staphylococci? This one actually is Greek. But it simply means little balls (that’s the cocci bit) arranged ‘Like a bunch of grapes.’ because that’s what the bacteria look like under a microscope. Again, let’s take away the complicated bit at the end and just leave staph. Just call it staph, easy. Staph. Streptococci? Little balls again, (cocci) but this time twisted into chains. And again, we chop off the complicated bit on the end and we are left with strep, as in a strep throat. Strep. Most of the other bacteria that are our concern have simpler names, but the point is that they just that – they are names, simply names. They are not there to bamboozle or intimidate you, they are tools of description, nothing scarier than that. So, in this course, as I said at the very beginning, we don’t say bugs or nasties or the bad guys, we call them bacteria and, when necessary, we use the correct name. Deal?