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Antibiotic Resistant Staph Infections

Posted by michael on from the gorillas-to-eat-the-snakes dept.

oliphaunt writes "This! morning! at! Yahoo! there! is! a! story! about! drug-resistant! bacteria! This is interesting because, as of July 5 of this year, "It was the first case of vancomycin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus in the United States." Nobody can PROVE it of course, but this is probably a result of overprescription of antibiotics, and people not following doctor's directions, combined with stuff like antibiotic hand soap available over the counter. So what do we do when the bugs are resistant to everything we have? The answer is we die."

3 of 91 comments (clear)

  1. Antibiotic soap? Probably not... by WolfWithoutAClause · · Score: 5, Interesting
    It's more likely to be related to the 'growth promoters' fed to cattle. That's a really bad idea.

    Anyway, there are other things we can do. Phage is always there in our armoury, and unlike antibiotics, bacteria have little chance of out evolving it...

    (For those not in the know, Phage is the name given to viruses that have coevolved with bacteria. The idea is that you hunt around for a virus that kills the bacteria and spray the viruses around and the bacteria is killed. It seems to work... the Russians use it sometimes, it's cheaper than antibiotics.Viruses mutate faster than bacteria can.)

    --

    -WolfWithoutAClause

    "Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"
  2. Antibacterial and Antibiotic by freerangegeek · · Score: 3, Interesting

    There are lots of things that are 'antibacterial' without being an 'antibiotic'. Chlorox is certainly antibacterial, but it's not an antibiotic in the sense that a doctor prescribes.

    The compound used in most soaps, triclosan, isn't related to penecillin, erythromycin, etc. I certainly wouldn't recommend you eat Dial.

    So washing your hands with antibacterial Dial isn't going to doom you to death by vancomycin resistant staph.

    There are good reasons to avoid antibacterial soap, like killing of beneficial organisms, but don't confuse that with antibiotic resistant organisms caused by misuse of prescribed antibiotics.

  3. Unsurprising by Fluffy+the+Cat · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The number of bacteria on the planet is unimaginably huge. Bacteria are capable of passing genes between each other horizontally. As a result, you can effectively treat the entire bacterial population of the planet as a single gene pool. Given enough time, any beneficial mutation will pass from one end of the population to the other.

    Now, this is obviously a problem in terms of antibiotics. Many antibiotics are still generated from natural sources, and some fairly harmless bacterial species has probably developed immunity to that (by virtue of happening to live in the soil around the ferns that secrete it, for example). The genes providing that immunity can pass to pretty much ever other bacterial species on the planet. This isn't a rapid process, but it will be sped up by imposing additional selection pressure - for instance, treating bacteria with that antibiotic.

    Overuse or inappropriate use of antibiotics isn't really the trigger here. Imposing any degree of selection pressure will result in the same thing happening - it's only a matter of timing. More careful use of antibiotics may give us a few hundred years more if we're lucky, ten years more if we're not. The point to remember is that no matter how clever your antibiotic, there will be a gene in some bacterium somewhere that provides immunity to it. And, if you wait long enough, that will end up in the bacteria you're trying to kill.

    It's not an intractable problem. There's likely to (somewhere) be an enzyme that will digest your antibiotic, but if you develop something that degrades that enzyme you're back in business. The chances of a random bacterium having both the resistance and an unrelated gene that protects the resistance mechanism is the square root of the probability of it having the resistance alone (probably less - having the resistance is likely to have proven useful in nature, and so will be more popular. The probability of having both genes will therefore be corespondingly less), which gives us a fighting chance. New techniques in drug development are likely to mean that we can design new drgs that can defeat any resistance mechanism that turns up.

    Remember though, antibiotics have only been around for a hundred years or so. Humanity survived before then. Antibiotics increase average life expectency, but they're not required for continued human survival.

    My final year dissertation was on this topic. You can find a copy at www-jcsu.jesus.cam.ac.uk/~mjg59/resistance.pdf .