rickettsia
Americannoun
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any member of the genus Rickettsia, comprising rod-shaped to coccoid microorganisms that resemble bacteria but can be as small as a large virus and reproduce only inside a living cell, parasitic in fleas, ticks, lice, and mites and transmitted by bite to vertebrate hosts, including humans, causing such severe diseases as typhus and Rocky Mountain spotted fever.
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any rickettsia or rickettsialike microorganism of the orders Rickettsiales and Chlamydiales.
noun
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Etymology
Origin of rickettsia
1915–20; < New Latin, after Howard T. Ricketts (1871–1910), U.S. pathologist; see -ia
Vocabulary lists containing rickettsia
Example Sentences
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Infectious diseases caused by rickettsia bacteria, especially those transmitted by fleas, lice, or mites.
From Mother's Remedies Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers of the United States and Canada by Ritter, Thomas Jefferson
Better yet, it was one of the first drugs to show activity against some odd ball microbes called rickettsiae.
From Time Magazine Archive
Doctors had found no sure weapons against rickettsiae, * the tiny organisms that are smaller than bacteria but larger than most viruses.
From Time Magazine Archive
But when Dr. Joseph McDade, 36, examined the lung tissue of victims of last summer's outbreak, he found no trace of any rickettsiae.
From Time Magazine Archive
Like Chloromycetin, it deals with many of the rickettsias.
From Time Magazine Archive
Chloramphenicol plugged a big gap in the antibiotic field: it proved particularly deadly against the rickettsias, untouched by either penicillin or streptomycin.
From Time Magazine Archive
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
