Slashdot Mirror
Antibiotic Resistant Staph Infections
LinuxGeek8 writes "There's a news update on a previous article about the first case of antibiotic resistant staph infections. The woman who has the infection is being kept up to 6 months in an isolation room. She is taking an antibiotic that is working, after many others did not.
"In the scheme of public health threats, this has to rank close to the top," David Ropeik, director of risk communication at the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis, said of antibiotic resistance."
What doesn't help is the way that antibiotics have been indiscriminately and thoughtlessly prescribed these last several years for even the slightest ailments.
Then there's some research suggesting that feeding antibiotics to animals isn't such a great idea either since all the nasties associated with that can be ingested later by humans. Try googling for the info
What will they sell us once their magic potions no longer work? Maybe invent a couple more highly profitable diseases, or just classify more things as pathologies. There just isn't the same profit in prevention.
Vivez sans temps mort
Antibacterial soap doesn't contain antibiotics, as far as I know, and certainly doesn't contain Vancomycin.
Now, "Hey, Mom, thanks for taking me to the pediatrician for antibitoics every time I got the sniffles," is another matter, entirely.
You are probably joking, but there is some credibility to the theory that, when we started living indoors, sterilizing our environment, using lipid soaps ("antibacterial" is only new in the Marketing sense), taking antibiotics, and so on, we diminished our exposure to pathogens. Way back when, routine exposure to such things as polio and smallpox led to infant mortality rates that we would not tolerate today, but also bestowed on those who survived much more immunity to disease.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
with antibiotic resistance; though just wait till enough disease paranoid people start loading up on antibiotics with the 2 plague cases in NY... that should give plenty of bugs the opportunity to evolve resistance! ;)
Heck, with things like this developing its a wonder anti-evolutionist 'creation science' people can show their faces in public!
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
If giving antibiotics for every single illness is a bad idea for humans, then it's likely a bad idea to turn every single cow's bloodstream into an antibiotic river.
Maybe the state's highest function is to grind out insoluble problems. (Zelazny, Hall of Mirrors)
and don't eat meat
Nearly all nutritionists will tell you that not eating meat at all is doing as much harm to you as it is doing good.
The proper advice is to avoid eating TOO MUCH meat. Even if you don't think you are eating too much red meat, you probably still are. You should never eat more red-meat than you can hold in the palm of your hand. Really, that's all you need in a single meal. Fish is an excellent food source, and turkey (or chicken when cooked properly) is also an excellent alternative to red meat.
So you can get your meat without pumping yourself full of the nasty crap that comes from it.
I myself don't even eat meat every day.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
There is a good overview article on phage therapy in last week's Science magazine.
Phages therapy still faces the development of resistance. Natural selection is a very powerful process, and various forms of gene exchange among bacteria makes it happen quite quickly.
Phages also are likely to be attacked by the human immune system (they are, after all, foreign viruses). Thus a lot of phages that work well in vitro don't do well in vivo.
However, they are an additional weapon against bacteria, and there are now some western companies that are combining the long Soviet experience with them with western venture capital and well equipped laboratories.
At some point, on might suppose that bacteria would run out of resistance strategies. Most changes to cause resistance come at some cost - which is why resistance genes will often fade away without the presence of antibiotics. Add up enough of these changes and you may produce bacteria that are not very viable. OTOH you may produce bugzilla!
The only good weather is bad weather.
Bacteria aren't restricted to darwinian evolution. They sometimes just grab genes from things they eat and incorporate them into their strucure.
This is still Darwinian Evolution. After all, Darwin didn't know about genes at all - and certainly not DNA! How the genomic change occurs is not an issue with Darwinian Evolution. Darwin's insight (others had this too, btw) was how natural selection worked to produce variations and new species.
Genomes change for in all sorts of ways. Mutation is one. Extremely important is gene exchange - typically sexual reproduction. This is very powerful or the high costs of it (please, no bad jokes) wouldn't be tolerated by natural selection. There are other mechanisms... bacteria can simply pick up DNA that is floating around in their environment - especially plasmids. Viruses can cause germ line changes - introducing new genes or modifying existing ones.
The only good weather is bad weather.
The hospital that my father works in has had similar cases in the past: infections that would only respond to the latest antibiotics.
This is rather worrying, especially when you think that the main cause of all this resistance buildup is GPs prescribing antibiotics copiously (at the behest of patients, true, but what's wrong with giving placebos? Probably will get them lawsuits for misleading the patients, hmm) and commercial farming where antibiotics are used liberally to stock up the animals..
Michel
Fedora Project Contribut
This is generally a bad idea, although it's used in some really serious infections if it's required (like endocarditis) if the antibiotics have a synergistic effect.
Contrary to what is apparently popular belief, antibiotics are not all nice and can be taken whenever you feel like it. Antibiotics can cause some of the most hideous allergic-type responses of anything on earth (like Stevens-Johnson syndrome) that are often fatal. This is pretty rare but not as rare as we'd like, and there's no way to predict when it will happen, since it can happen to you even if you've taken that medication before without a problem.
The real answer to this lies with the consumer. Don't come to the doctor and want antibiotics. In the majority of cases of upper respiratory infections, diarrhea, and other problems, antibiotics are useless. It's the subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) demands for antibiotics that make docs give antibiotics to patients in the first place rather than spend another 10 minutes explaining to a progressively more angry patient why the doctor won't "give them something to make them feel better."
If a lot more people become vegetarians, then you'd need to grow more vegetables. That means you need more pesticides, and possibly some genetic modifications as well.
Actually, if a lot more people become vegetarians, then you'd need to grow less vegetables!
See before you can eat meat, you need to grow plants for the cow to eat. To make enough meat to feed 1 human, the cow eats enough vegetables that could directly have fed 5 humans.
So a vegetarian requires 1/5th the vegetable production that a meat eater does.
more vegetarians == Less vegetables == less fertilisers and pestisides etc != not more
Vancomycin-resistant staph is really bad news. Vancomycin was the last line of defense among antibiotics that have been tested. Its successors are very recent and might have side effects that haven't been detected yet. Not to mention that they are very expensive.
That's one more reason why it's a bad idea to use antibiotic resistance genes as selection markers in genetically modified organisms (GMOs). The process goes like this: A researcher wants to splice, say, a sheep's wool-producing skin gene into common corn so that the GM corn will have wooly fibers (cheaper wool, great!). The researcher prepares thousand of modified cell cultures. The gene splicing has succeeded in only a small percentage of them. How does he select the cells with the spliced gene? Easy: He also splices another gene, coding for antibioresistance (ABR), and looks for its signature in the Petri dishes, using standard reagents.
Then when the wooly corn is marketed, all its cells carry the same ABR gene. Eat the corn, and the bacteria in your guts get a chance to acquire the ABR gene from exposure to it. Then you get sick. The doctor prescribes antibiotics. All the E. Coli in your guts are killed, except the infinitesimal fraction that acquired this ANR gene. Then the surviving fraction repopulates your intestine. All your E. Coli population is now ABR. They will transmit the gene to some pathogene sooner or later.
Understand me, I don't really think that GMO are evil. Some GMO are actually very good ideas. The problem is that implementation of the idea with selection through ABR is very dangerous. Look it up for yourself.
--
Mad science! Robots! Underwear! Cute girls! Full comic online! http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/
I discovered it when it was recommended to me for a nasty GI virus that wouldn't go away by normal starvation. Killed the sucker right off. As a nursing student I will be trying to bring this into any hospital I eventually work for.
2 .htm"> second letter
Please don't. I'm serious.
As someone with medical training, you should KNOW that most diseases go away by themselves and there's no substitute for double-blind, placebo controlled studies to ascertain the efficacy of a given treatment. Please don't rip off poor people in their time of need by sending them to GNC to pay lots of money for various things that just don't work, and in some cases kill.
Note that no links to peer-reviewed articles exist on the link you provide. Just assertions who all curiously use the commercial name of the product. Look at the broad range of things it claims to cure...missing only "the vapors" and "consumption" to be pure snake oil.
A quick check of the FDA, however, reveals that these makers haven't bothered to put it to the test of actually trying to show it cures people instead of making outrageous claims:
first letter
a href="http://www.fda.gov/cder/warn/cyber/cyber200
And since the stuff you'll be foisting off on suffering, desperate people is unregulated, you won't even know that the brand they buy actually contains the advertised product, nor that it's safe.
Hell, I don't know exactly why switching everyone in the middle east to purple robes wouldn't bring peace, except that nobody's shown even a correlation between purple-robe-wearing and sudden elimination of religious fanaticism (though it'd be fun to try on Pat Robertson in a study). Similarly, since no one has actually shown that the concoction you ingested (if it actually contained what its maker claims it did) had anything to do with your improvement. It's not as if all your white blood cells up and died, leaving it as the only thing between you and death.
Please, go to pharmacy school if not getting a full MD before prescribing drugs, because that's exactly what you'll be doing if you recommend it to anyone.
And that's just plain wrong.