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."

Comments

It does rank up there....

[i_want_you_to_throw_]

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

Re:It does rank up there....

[rodgerd]

Unfortunately, patients are part of the problem - Gps are often pleasantly surprised when I don't want drugs as the automatic response to a problem, because most patients are aggressive abour demanding them, and too stupid to use them properly.

Re:"hey mom"

[duncan7]

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.

Re:all the more reason

[fishbowl]

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.

or plague

[myowntrueself]

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!

welcome to denial

[shren]

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.

Re:And this is

[Jace of Fuse!]

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.

Re:Resistance or Darwinism?

[mesocyclone]

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.

Inevitable, worryingly

[salimma]

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..

Another reason why GMO antibiores markers is bad

[SysKoll]

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.

-- SysKoll