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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."
thanks for making me use all that anti-bacterial soap all the time. now i'm locked up in a room for 6 months.
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
For all you pathology people, is this a common method for bugs, or is it limited to a few families?
-Cyc
/.'s 10 Millionth
West Nile is a virus. There are no antibiotics for viruses, only treatments and immune shots. Immune shots allow our own bodies to make antibodies against viruses, so they shouldn't be susceptible to a similar problem with viruses (although immune shots must be taken at least several weeks before exposure to the virus).
Watch, it'll become immune to radiation. Now THAT's a scary bug.
Education is the silver bullet.
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
to quit washing your hands! the more bacteria resistant YOU are, the less you have to rely on artificial crutches like antibiotics.
Luckily, i take my cipro once a week, so this shouldnt bother me.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
If you'd read the article as opposed to jumping at the opportunity to blame animal farming, you'd have read the vancomycin resistant staph infection (and it's presence in the Detroit area) is attributed to the mixing of antibiotics, including methicillin, with heroin by Detroit drug users from the 1970's. They were attempting to avoid infections.
And my high school collegeues made fun of my lack of social life. Ha!
Has the bacteria really developed a resistance? Or have all the non-resistive bacteria died off and now only resistive bacteria remain?
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
There are many strains of antibiotic resitant bugs out there.
I used to work in a hospital and we had a lot of patients with MRSA (Multiple Resistance to Strains of Antibiotics) related issues. These patients were kept isolated and treated until the MRSA infection was cleared then they could be operated on.
Quite often these bugs not dangerous until a person gets sick then they can be fatal.
This is why people should not use antibiotics for viral infections (such as the common cold) and why if you do have to use anti-biotics you should take all the pills as prescribed until they are done.
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.
So just use regular soap, sterilize things with alcohol or bleach, and don't eat meat (besides the antibiotics, there's all KINDS of other nasty stuff in that stuff)
Do you really need reason for beer? Wingman Brewers
That we are getting soft. All these new products that have anti-bactereal stuff in them aren't helping us, in the long run anyway. It's sad when you see kids afraid of dirt, or people who have to wipe down every little thing before they feel it's clean. Yes, I'm wash myself.. but I don't feel the need to buy every product that 'Kills 99.9% of germs FAST!' I rarely kid a cold, and when I do my body fights it off without the use of twenty different products. Tylenol, and some good chicken soup are all I need. And yet they say the flu is getting worse by the year. We're soft, we need to toughen up. Go play in the mud.
There is no spork.
No. This is the result of people "self-medicating". When a doctor prescribes medication for 6 weeks, if you feel better after 4 weeks, there are still bacteria in your system. The next two weeks work on killing them. If you don't kill all of them, the stronger ones that survived will evolve to be immune to the medication (gross oversimplification). When they spread to someone else, who also doesn't finish the course of meds, they will become more medication-resistant. And this is the reason we have drug-resistant bacteria.
I can't say that I don't give a fuck. I've just run out of fuck to give.
If you read the article, the resistance is attributed to theft of genetic material from another organism. So those bacteria which were most effective at stealing vancomycin resistance survived to breed, and pass on their criminal legacy.
Many health professionals hope that following this summer's discovery of vancomycin-resistant staph aureus in the metro woman's foot, Americans will be scared enough to accept limited use of antibiotics.
Not bloody likely. Though maybe if more doctors took the approach that was taken at the Olympic Village in Salt Lake City, the over-use of anti-biotics might start to decline. Not many doctors have that kind of captive audience, though.
It's not a matter of scaring people away from antibiotics, it's a matter of giving them something that actually might work, instead of just giving them something to get them out of the office...
This spectre of super-bacteria (another writer correctly notes that antibiotics have nothing to do with viral infections) has been over-hyped by the press. There have been occasional examples of astonishingly resistant variations on common bacteria, but almost all have arisen in hospital settings with other complications present. They aren't whipping through the community, in other words. There are also special interests, such as the anti-antibiotics in animal feed people (a cause I tend to believe in), which have disingenuously used the problem to boost their cause, lacking any causal connection.
:) Actually, I minored in biology and immunology, FWIW.
There is good evidence anitbiotics are overprescribed and, much worse, misused by the public (always always finish your course of antibiotic correctly, the last mile really is important even though you may feel fine -- it sounds preachy but it's true). But this is a different issue; the super-bacteria appear in hospital setting where doctors are doing their utmost to fight infection. Vancomycin is still pretty nuclear stuff.
I wish I had a good cite handy, but I can't dredge one up offhand; do take a look if you're interested, at NIH and CDC for starters. IMHO the superbacteria are kind of like the killer bees, long heralded but never quite arriving in force. I don't mean to make light of the potential trouble; it's just not here yet, and won't for a while, and it pales in contrast to staggering public health problems we have like HIV and smoking and unaffordable prescriptions and even West Nile virus. When you hear reports in terms of infections per 100,000 people, as opposed to isolated case studies, take heed. For now it merely makes for good copy, over and over.
"I'm not a doctor but I play one onlin."
I think the main problem with infections and diseases becoming more resistant to treatment lies partly in a lot of people failing to use the medicine for the required amount of time. I had a skin fungus that kept coming back because everytime I cound't see it anymore, I would quit spraying the medicine on it. After a few times of this, the medicine was no longer effective and I had to get some much stronger (and much more costly) medicine to combat the problem. Using antibiotics for a short while until the problem is apparently gone and then stopping, may allow whatever it is that is being treated to adapt to the treatments. Then it gets spread to someone else and the process repeats itself until eventually, we have no way to stop even common ailments.
How is it that one careless match can start a forest fire, but it takes a whole box to start a campfire?
How are they gonna explain this in classrooms in Alabama? (or wherever the heck it is that evolution is banned in classrooms)
"Well kids you see God just recently gave the staph bacteria a gracious gift; antibiotic resistance. Of course staph didn't *evolve* this resistance since theres no such thing as evolution, children.
We just have to wonder at Gods great plan where he makes these changes in living things just to make life harder for us God fearing folk. Praise the lord.
Ok now children all lne up for your lobotomy operations; you won't be needing independent thought with God looking after things."
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
you have never met teh bacteria and mildew in my bathroom. THe view soap as fertilizer a this point. Chlorox merely annoys them.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
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)
The Russians have been working for years on alternatives to antibiotics. Phages are viruses that target bacteria and have been shown to be successful in targeting what would otherwise be very resistant strains. http://www.phages.org/PhageHistory.html
Isn't this just another strain of the MRSA [cdc.gov]
Sorta. You could probably call it VRSA (Vancomycin Resistant Stap... etc). It's a step up as Vanc & it's contempories are generally used to treat MRSA and there really isn't anything more powerful available. It's worrying as you get a bug that becomes almost impossible to treat (MRSA is a challenge to treat and people die but a full spectrum immune bug could be that Ace in the sleeve that the environment produces to curb the rampant expansion of humanity...)
ATBE we've pretty much come to the end of what can effectively be treated with Anitbiotics and a new approach must be found, something that has not gotten a lot of attention what with antibiotics being so effective and profitable...
It's not that I'm Anti-American - I'm Pro-Freedom
That we've licked staph, along comes some guy with $6Mil. "We can rebuild it. We have the technology. We can make it better, faster, stronger."
Why not fork?
Not only is this not the first time, but antibiotic-resistant strains are already resisting brand new classes of antibiotics designed to beat them when all others fail.
:-|
All I'm sayin' is that I'm funneling down the vitamin C like Pez.
There have been rumblings in the news for over a decade that profligate use of anitbiotics in both medical care and factory farming would lead to just this sort of problem. After years of warnings, no one should be surprised by this development. DNA swapping among bacteria species is a well-known phenomenon, and I read years ago that biologists were concerned this very thing would happen.
What's the alternative? Virtually every species of bacteria has one or more virus species that have evolved to prey on it. These bacteriophage (or phage for short) can sometimes be used as treatment for bacterial infection. They were supposedly the Next Big Thing about a century ago, before antibiotics stole the show. Now there is renewed interest in this approach. There was also a recent development of a technique using only a phage-produced enzyme to fight bacterial infections.
Google "phage therapy" or "phage enzyme" for some good reading on the subject.
I have actually worked in S. aureus research and it is a very scary bug. Some of the strains we had collected were resistant to 12 different antibiotics and even Arsenic. The main reason S. aureus becomes so easily resistant to new antibiotics is because it easily picks up circular strands of DNA called plasmids which carry resistance genes on them. The most likely source of the resistance gene is not cattle but other bacteria present in the hospitals. Enterococcus, a cousin of S. aureus which lives in a person's gut is highly resistant to Vancomycin and it was expected that sooner or later this will be passed to S. aureus. There have been cases of this happening in Japan a few years ago. The best place to pick up a nasty germ is in the hospital since most patiets there are on antibiotics so the only bugs around are highly resistant to a wide range of drugs.
And this is the reason we have drug-resistant bacteria
Unfortunately, the answer is, "all of the above". Overprescription, failure of patients to complete the course of treatment, use of antibiotics in animal feed as a preventative and growth inducer, inappropriate self-treatment (I'd never heard of people mixing antibiotics with heroin, but that would certainly qualify), over-the-counter sales (mostly in third-world countries, but you'd be surprised at what's available at farm stores), heavy advertising by the pharmaceutical industry to encourage more sales. Every time an antibiotic is used, there is a small but finite risk of promoting antibiotic-resistance.
VRSA (vanc. resistant s. aureus) is some scary schtuff. S. Aureus is one of the most virulent organisms we as humans get infected with; aside from the whole being sick in general, it can cause septic shock (death if you're not in a hospital at the time) and VERY rapid failure of your heart valves (called acute bacterial endocarditis). Vanc was once the last line of drugs. If it failed, we had no treatment. Since then, two more classes of ABs have been invented, and we deliberately avoid their general use so they'll be useful in just such situations; some doctors, sadly, don't use this guideline near as much as they need to. Sadly, S. Aureus is also a bacteria which is astoundingly well adapted to take up genetic change. These little buggers actually have "bacteria sex" and share their antibiotic resistance.
Here's some suggestions to help you avoid these problems:
1) Most MDR (multidrug resistant) bugs are found in hospitals (med word: nosocomial). You're relatively safe from this stuff when you're out in the community.
2) TAKE ALL OF YOUR ANTIBIOTICS AS PRESCRIBED. Taking just enough to feel better is the worst idea ever - all the bugs left have now been genetically selected for greater resistance.
3) If the doc says you don't need an antibiotic, don't push too hard - ABs can cause serious side effects and drug resistance in YOU. Remeber - a normal health human has 10x more bacteria than they do human cells - most bacteria are there to help!!!
--long time ago I had an SA infection, it is TRULY sucky, incredibly hard to get rid of. took me six months or so to beat it. At the time I was put on erythomycin (sp).
With that said, past few years been using colloidal silver on external wounds/infections, works quite well. I was skeptical at first until I tried it. Still using it when needed. Much better than any store bought/prescription antibio cream I ever tried. The only bummer is, it's very inexpensive. You can make it yourself easily or buy it cheaply pre-made, variety of places. People have this ingrained almost religious belief that stuff has to cost a lot of money and come from the medical deity to be effective. (Almost like the almost religious belief that software has to come from an expensive closed source place to be any good). You don't get that "full" satisfaction of paying mucho dinero for it so you know it'll work, like big pharmco products.
Yes, I know there are some issues with taking it orally by the 55 gallon drum, I'm not recommending that at all, but for some reason those silver particles will sure kill the cooties. No idea if effective or not on SA, but given that the medcos are stumped, well????
Not to be construed as medical advice, closed track, illegal where void and like that there.
I'm not so sure that spam-the-mail wouldn't survive as well. I've a sneaking suspicion that those e-mail mass marketers have got to be some sort of subspecies of cockroach.
Good judgment comes from experience.
Experience comes from bad judgment.
Not to push you over the edge, but the antibacterial soaps are controversial; many studies show they are little more effective than regular soap. Some contend the antibacterial ingredients can cause problems all their own.
Most bacteriocides that you'd be willing to put on your skin take a while to work, more time than you'd have the soap on. The most effective treatment is a good scrub, which physically scrapes the bacteria away -- not glamorous but effective. Most of us do a lousy job at handwashing -- it needs to be thorough and repeated during the day, as the bacteria multiply on your skin -- myself included, and I have two of those little disease vectors called "children."
Only 40% of people wash their hands exiting public restrooms, one study showed (imagine being the data-taker); the problem there being the encouragement of the fecal-oral route of disease transmission from the non-handwasher to others. I'll let you visualize what fecal-oral involves. So be a good citizen and lather up.
Oh, and the next time the press reports someone getting sick from beef tainted with E. coli, note that "coli" means colon, where these bacteria were discovered. These E. coli come from careless slaughtering practices and, stated frankly, mean that "there's manure in the meat." (quoting the muckraking author of the excellent Fast Food Nation)
It's a microbe's world after all.
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 even recent research that even suggests that children exposed to pets (and the inherent uncleanlyness) have lower incidence of asthma and allergies down the road.
"I'll have a Guinness, no wait, make that a Coors Light" -Grad student I work with, who shall remain anonymous...
And for my own favorite test, just like chiropractric, colloidal silver users make some wide, sweeping, and exagerated claims for what silver "can cure". I mean crap, that's a huge list of things it will cure or alleviate. You just have to wonder when you see that many claims of a miracle medicine/tonic.
"Doubt your doubts and believe your beliefs." -- Switchfoot, Ode to Chin
Hey, great plugs for "Colloidial Silver". It's natural, right? And anything natural must be a Good Thing, right?
Yeah, kinda like Hemlock is natural.
Check out these links before you hit the natural foods store:
Rosemary Jacob's Argyria Pages -- her skin is a fetching shade of blue-grey, somewhat like the robot on Futurama.
Politician turns blue from drinking 'health' solution -- the Libertarian US Senate candidate from Montana would have had the distinction, if elected, of being the only Blue member of Congress. (I'm a Green, myself).
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
Think about this: If I get shot in the arm
No, think about this...
Bacteria is everywhere. It's always growing, reproducing, and constantly mutating. So, if you take a sample of any given group of bacteria, it is easy to assume they won't all be of the same breed, and even those of the same breed won't all be of the same genetic line. The fact is, being simpler lifeforms they evolve and mutate faster.
Now, let's say you manufacture a chemical that will kill bacteria "X". You take a dish full of bacteria and since they're very obviously not all the same it is highly possible that a few of those millions will be immune to your neat little chemical. You pour it in and you take a count and let's say only a few dozen live. Well guess what? When they reproduce you're left with a colony of bacterium that is immune to your neat little drug. Next time it gets a good growth pattern going, your antibiotic may not be as effective.
Fortunately, our bodies fight infections on their own, so antibiotics aren't a "kill all" type of attack, but more like a "kill most and let the body take care of the rest". For this reason it is a good idea to ALWAYS take all of your prescribed antibiotics, assuming of course you actually needed them in the first place. You are basically helping your body help it's self.
This too is a gross over-simplifaction but...
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
Don't be an idiot. Where's the evidence (real or anecdotal) that the average guy who doesn't finish his antibiotics says to himself, "Well, golly, since evolution is just atheist propoganda, there is no reason for me to fear antibiotic resistance developing in bacteria--THEREFORE, I will now stop taking my antibiotic regime."
Don't be stupid.
"Doubt your doubts and believe your beliefs." -- Switchfoot, Ode to Chin
Sometimes this works backwards, but I used to have some really bad allergies to animals: cat fur, feathers, etc.
After toughing it out in clean fresh air, coupled with visits to the chickens in the barn, etc, most of my animal allergies went away. I was still allergic to cats, but got rid of that after we got three of the shedding creatures.
In reverse cases, sometimes the allergies chip away at the immune system, causing gradually increasing sickness. But in most cases I've heard of, low exposure over time builds tolerence.
*Note: That's low exposure, stuffing a kid with allergies in a house of 50 cats is probably not recommended in the short run...
Citation please? I find this incredibly hard to believe. Not that anti-biotics could have some effect, but that a viral infection can undo the vast differences between eucaryotic and procayotic metabolism. My molecular biologist friends think that that idea is utter horsehit.
You can only drink 30 or 40 glasses of beer a day, no matter how rich you are.
-- Colonel Adolphus Busch
(Completely agree with parent post, minor correction, then rant)
MRSA actually means Methicillin Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus.
Now we have VRSA. Vancomycin Resistant Staphyloccocus Aureus.
There are no "wonder drugs" in the pipeline. We're reaching the end of the road for antibiotics. It won't be sudden, but it will happen.
Many diseases we currently think of as relatively trivial are going to become real killers again. Millions of people are going to die.
It won't be the young, fit and healthy as much as the very young and the very old.
But let's keep feeding the antibiotics to farm animals. It makes them more profitable. Got a slight viral cold? Demand antibiotics. It's your right.
It's the tragedy of the commons again.
Crazy question for microbiologists: Is it possible that resistance to a specific antibiotic costs an organism enough that it could no longer out-compete it's non-resistant cousins? Would it be worth infecting someone who has a resistant strain with a non-resistant strain in the hope that the non-resistant one will 'win'? Then, (if the patient still lives), treat that with antibiotics?
Or are you going to get so much genetic transfer that it's worse than dangerous?
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."
The latest all natural fad being used as an anti-microbial is "Grapefruit Seed Extract" (commonly called GSE).
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.
Hopefully, and I don't see why not, it will work against antibiotic resistant bacteria and viruses.
A good overview
Here's a good summary from another site:
Grapefruit seed extract is derived from the bioflavonoids found in the seed and pulp. Its anti-germicide action has shown a growth-inhibiting effect on bacteria, fungi, parasites, and viruses in several in vitro studies. The effectiveness of grapefruit seeds was discovered accidentally by a doctor, who noticed that the seeds did not decompose in his compost file. Further examination revealed that the grapefruit seeds killed any microorganism that tried to decompose it. Laboratory studies have shown it to be effective in inhibiting bacteria such as Staphylococcus aureus, Escherichia coli, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, and Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Grapefruit seed extract has been formulated by a number of manufacturers for various uses, including an internal bactericide, water disinfectant, skin cleanser, and first-aid spray. Grapefruit seed extract is also a treatment for house pets and livestock that may be susceptible to bacterial infections from a variety of sources.
Multiple anbitiotic resistance in bacteria is documented. I can refer you to a brief article which shows that the med community is aware of it.
* Tenover FC, Hughes JM. The challenges of emerging infectious diseases: development and spread of multiply-resistant bacterial pathogens. Journal of the American Medical Association 1996;275:300-304.
Also, we can consider this from two points of view and see why it's reasonable:
1.) bacteria can transfer genes from one to another by plasmid - a plasmid is a small circle of DNA that's not part of the bacterial genome. so one plasmid can code for resistance to antibiotic A, and another plasmid can code for resistance to antibiotic B. this modularity just from the molecular biology of bacteria makes bacteria well-equipped to deal with multiple assaults. a bacteria doesn't have to independently develop resistance, it can acquire it easily from another bacteria, mix and match etc.
2.) the nature of darwinian selection of the survivalists means that, while it is *unlikely* for any particular bacteria for develop resistance, *once* it does develop resistance, then it will likely survive and multiply under heavy antibiotic environments.
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
And the reason behind THAT is that it's better for the INDIVIDUAL to consume a lot of antibiotics, even while it's bad in the long term for society. So who's going to risk losing their life to infection in order to prevent antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria from evolving? It sure as hell won't be me, thank you very much.
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 don't know about this guy's compost pile, but I can tell you from my various attempts to sprout grapefruit seeds, that they do indeed rot (quite nastily) if conditions are too wet and the seed "drowns". OTOH, *NO* seed decomposes so long as it is still alive. So there's nothing unique about grapefruit seeds in this respect.
However, you might look into apple seeds. When I was a kid, I discovered that a peeled and crushed apple seed held against a canker sore for 10 minutes would cause very rapid healing in 90% of cases. Maybe a cyanide compound of some sort, killing a specific pathogen, I dunno (never bothered to pursue it, no idea if anyone's researched it).
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
I and many others have cured ourselves without antibiotics, and I want to tell you how. This by no means qualifies as official medical information, it's just what happened.
Disclaimer: I am not a doctor and this is not a scientific analysis. This is just my story. It worked for me. If you have staph you should seek medical attention immediately. It's no joke, and even the doctors may not be able to help you.
OK, if you have a weak stomach, stop reading now.
First I should explain how staph attacks you, typically. Usually what happens is that you get a nick on your lower leg, and it just won't heal. Soon you have a festering infection which grows rapidly. It's amazingly efficient and agressive. It eats a sizable hole in your leg, and then starts to spread. You start getting pimples on other parts of your body which quickly grow and soon your are covered with round, dime or quarter-sized oozing festering holes. It's pretty horrifying. If you don't do something about it, you will end up with serious problems.
I was infected for a couple of months, but I recovered without antibiotics, and many others have by using similar techniques. I have thought about the whole experience a lot, and I think I can identify the core elements of a successful staph cure. These elements can be divided into two main categories. First, you must have some kind of internal defense to prevent the spread of the staph through the bloodstream and the intercellular fluid. In the usual cure this is done by antibiotics, but these are losing their effectiveness. But fortunately your body comes equipped with an immune system for this purpose, but you must do everything you can to strengthen it and give it the advantage over the bacteria. Secondly, you must have some sort of external attack. This is the really horrible part. The staph burrows under the dead flesh it kills, making it extremely difficult to attack from the outside.
Internal Defense
External attack
This can be divided into two phases. In the first phase, the staph colony is expanding into the flesh around it, and your attack must be very aggressive. In the second phase, your body has isolated the colony and built a membranous wall around it. Then the treatment must be very gentle.
Phase one; Expanders:
During this phase, I think the wounds should be left open. This is to encourage them to ooze pus, which is actually a good thing because it establishes an outward flow of fluid and slows the staph down. The objective of this phase is to slow the growth of the colony enough for your body to build a membranous wall around it, isolating the infection from the intercellular fluid and allowing the healing process to begin.
Phase 2; Contractors:
You will know you have entered this phase when you stop finding so much dead flesh, and the colony slows its growth. At this point you build a wall around the infection, and within a couple of days the remaining dead flesh outside the wall should come off easily, without extensive scrubbing. Now you must change your approach:
Gradually the wound will begin to shrink. You must stick with the treatment rigorously and stick to the diet mercelessly. The cases that go on and on are the ones where the person simply cannot force themself to avoid sugar, alcohol and cigarettes, and just keep getting new infections.
Also, a note about clenliness. It's really important. You must clean and disinfect your entire environment completely all the time, especially your clothes and bedding. Do lots of laundry, take lots of showers, use chlorine liberally.
Well, that about covers it. After two months of this horrible daily torture, I finally got a grip on my sugar consumption, cured my last big sore, and recovered. I have big scars on my legs to tell the tale, but I'm actually grateful for the experience. It builds a hell of a lot of will power, which is useful stuff.
Good luck, and may the Force be with you.
My site: Free Nature Pictures
So many people take anti-biotics for everything, and don't complete their prescribed courses, that people forget the other tried and true methods of helping your body and immune system fight a cold.
1. Inhalation of steam and an antiseptic agent.
Eucalyptus oil or Tea Tree oil in water, then heated/boiled is a great way to kill off bugs in the air. Very good for throat/nasal infections. Scented burners are good value for this.
2. Acidic foods/liquids.
This includes oranges, lemons, apples, grapefruit and tomato, including juices of those. Vinegar, particularly cider and malt vinegar, can be good if used as a mouth wash/gargle or ingested (if you can). Salt is also a good thing to ingest when ill, but as always, too much is bad for you. Yes, I am advocating salt'n'vinegar potato chips here. *grin*
3. Mouth washes.
Cider and malt vinegar work well, as does salt water. Iodine throat wash (commonly found under the "Betadine" brand) is also very good, but don't swallow it. Listerine and other mouth washes (for teeth care/plaque) are also good value. And brush your teeth too.
4. Suppliments/herbal treatments.
Echinacea, and other herbal suppliments can help, though be warned that some may have bad or deadly side affects for some people. Ginger is used lots in Chinese medicine, and is apparently quite good for helping someone overcome a cold, but some people are allergic to it. Vitamin suppliments are also good if you haven't been eating right, or can't keep a lot of food down.
5. Fluids.
The kidneys are a primary place for a virus to be flushed from the human body. Don't drink too much though, as it is possible to kill yourself from taking too much fluids.
6. Regular wash/shower.
Sweat is another way for fluids to leave the body, and regular washing helps remove some viruses.
This is not a definitive list. But I'm hoping someone out there might find it useful. There are a lot of NATURAL ways to fight a cold. The goal is to help out the body. If that is by helping to remove the virus or most of the things the body fights against on a regular basis (air-born contaminants, throat bourne virii, etc), then you body will have more resources to chuck at other areas. Just think of the whole thing as a resource based game, where you are the resource. Remember though that too much of something can be bad though, so balance things out.
MRSA strains with intermediate resistance to vancomycin have been seen in many parts of the world since 1996, and patients certainly have died as as result of vancomycin treatment failure. However, these perhaps weren't so scary as the resistance mechanism was a very thick cell wall which made these strains very slow growing and not so viable in the absence of vancomycin.
What's new is that MRSA strains have now emerged with high-level vancomycin-resistance and this happened by acquistion of the vancomycin-resistance gene (vanA) from VRE. That this was possible was shown in the lab in 1992, but the first time it's been seen in patients was this year. The two reports of Vancomycin-resistant MRSA in the U.S. can be found in the CDC's newsletter:
MMWR Morb Mortal Wkly Rep 2002 Oct 11;51(40):902
MMWR Morb Mortal Wkly Rep 2002 Jul 5;51(26):565-7
How scary is it? Until recently MRSA has been almost exclusively a hospital pathogen, so it's pretty scary if you're a hospital patient with a lot of tubes sticking into you which alow the bugs to get in and cause infections, but if you're well it's not a big threat (doctors and nurses can carry MRSA, but generally they don't develop infections despite a lot of exposure). There have been reports recently of strains of MRSA that do spread well in the community, and that can cause serious infections amongst essentially healthy people. However, these have not been multiply-resistant strains, and really these are no worse than virulent strains of normal S. aureus which have been round for millions of years. The message is, if you're well, don't rush out and buy cipro (this will only helps MSRA as the bugs are resistant to it), and if you're ill, keep away from hospitals.
Just to rebut a few other comments: over-prescribing of antibiotics probably is very important for encouraging drug-resistantce, but even correct of use of antibiotics will lead to some resistance. Use of antibiotics in animal feed can't really be blamed in this case, as drugs of the same class as vancomycin (glycopeptides) have not been used in animal feed in the US, though they have in Europe. They've probably played a significant role in VRE transmission in humans in some European countries, but in the U.S. hospital prescribing of this and other antibiotics have probably been the driving force.
From Psalm 23:
"Thy rod and thy staph shall come for thee."
Clearly, the rod is the bacillus bacterium responsible for Anthrax, and the staph is the aureus.
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.
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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.
Not kidding...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/1907065.stm
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