Can Aa also be virulent?
Well, that’s another part of the equation. Aa is endowed with genes to produce leukotoxin and cytolethal distending toxin. Every time these toxins have been found in other micro-organisms, they have been associated with an infectious disease. So, turning back to the mouth, our work on LAP offers one of the best opportunities clinically to put this bug under the microscope, so to speak. Well, how did you pull together this study? We reached out to the local schools here in Newark. The student population is predominantly African American and Hispanic, or those most at risk for LAP. We’re in the process of providing baseline oral examinations to more than 3,000 school kids, ages 11 to 17. We’ve already done so for the first thousand, and that’s the data that we’ve just published. What did you find? In this first cohort, Aa was present in 147 kids. That translates to 14.7 percent, which is about what we expected in this age group. We divided our initial cohort of 1,075 students into two su
