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."
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
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).
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.
It is fairly common for many types of bacteria to swap genes. I don't think it is very common that you can observe such a concrete trait being transferred from one species to another.
It's not so much 'theft' as 'mating'. . .gene exchange is just one method by which bacteria maintain genetic diversity.
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.
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
Well, from science fiction land I'm looking forward to nanotechnology to save the day on this one. Hopefully about the time everything under the sun becomes resistent to antibiotics we will have microscopic robots running through our blood stream wiping out invaders.
... but we are going to machines sooner or later .. this sounds like a good place to start.
Does that mean we will be cyborgs? Kind of I guess
I wonder how much it will cost and how much control software companies will have over us then?
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
Could the indigenous bacteria sue for intellectual property theft?
What if a bacterium steals patented DNA? Do the pharmaceutical companies have a case against it?
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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...
(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?
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 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
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.