The next time you step out of the bath tub or shower, notice the tracks made by your wet feet. If the tracks are kidney-shaped, your foot is normal. If the prints your feet make have the shape of a sole, because the entire sole touches the floor, you have flat feet. T...

There are few diseases that have caused as much discussion and as much fear as polio. In fact, the fear of polio is all out of proportion to the damage it causes.

Polio is the nickname for infantile paralysis, or acute anterior poliomyelitis. It occurs in ep...

All around us there are invisible forms of life which we call germs. They are in the air, in the soil, in the water we drink and the food we eat. Many of them are harmless or even beneficial to man, but others may cause diseases.

The human body has many na...

Bacteria are the most widespread creatures in the world. Everything we touch, every breath of air contains millions of them. About 80 per cent of all bacteria are harmless. A small percentage is actually useful to us, and a small group of them are harmful to human being...

A virus is the smallest organism that produces disease. It cannot be seen directly by the ordinary microscope. But this doesn't mean that science hasn't been able to study the structure of a virus. Today there are ultramicroscopes that enable these tiny organisms to bec...

As man learns how to keep himself more clean and sanitary practices spread through the world, some of our worst diseases are gradually eliminated. One of these is typhoid fever. Just 60 years ago, thousands upon thousands of people were dying from it every year. Now d...

It may be hard for us to believe, but every year more than 2,000,000 people die of malaria! It's one of the most common diseases in the world, especially near tropical rivers and coasts. The reason it's common in such regions is that they are the habitats of the anopheles, ...

Sometimes you hear people say they don't want to live like parasites; they want to make their own way. A parasite lives with, in, or on another organism, the "host."

All living things depend on one another. But the parasite lives with another organism in...

This certainly isn't a pleasant subject, but many people suffer from tape­worm and so there is great curiosity about it. A kind of flatworm, the tapeworm is an intestinal parasite.

This means that it lives in the digestive tract of another animal, calle...

Most of us have a vague idea that somewhere inside of us there are coils and coils of intestines, amazing passageways through which food passes in the process of digestion. But few people have a clear under­standing of just how they work.

The l...