BREATHING in a bit of dirt might be enough to give you Parkinson’s. According
to a new theory, rare strains of a common soil bacterium may trigger the
disease.
The bacterium Nocardia asteroides is known to cause a lung infection
in humans that sometimes leads to brain abscesses. So microbiologist Blaine
Beaman from the University of California, Davis, injected disease-causing
strains of the bacterium into mice to find out how. Some of the mice developed
the lung and brain symptoms, but hundreds of others became shaky and slow in
their movement—symptoms that looked like Parkinson’s.
Electron microscopy revealed that…
