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New Superbug Weapon to Replace Failing Antibiotics
An anonymous reader writes "Researchers in British Columbia have identified a peptide that can fight infection by boosting the immune system. Because antibiotics are under threat due to an explosion of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, this may be just in time."
Why do I have a hard time trusting a source like "curedeath.com"?
Yeah, the mangled title warps the entire premise, which is that there is a new weapon against superbugs that doesn't involve creating more super-antibiotics to fight the super bugs (which of course will just eventually lead to a massive super bug some day that will kill you before you can treat it since everyone is a big baby and rushes out to get antibiotics at the first sniffle).
Maybe if we didn't prescribe an antibiotic for everything that can ever go wrong with a person, there wouldn't be so many resistant strains.
Sniffles? Take an antibiotic.
The end result is that a person's immune system no longer has to do it's job, job gets done for it. The immune system becoems weaker, they get sick more, then get more anti-biotics.
Wash, Rinse, Repeat.
Immune system just doesn't work well for fighting off certain bacteria, such as tuberculosis and antharax. Also, a lot of hospital infections happen to elderly, AIDS patients and otherwise people with weak immune system. Even with a booster, it would be better to develop substances that kill bacteria directly.
to cows!!! and I don't mean fat chicks. Make it a crime against humanity.
Si vis pacem, para bellum! For evil to succeed good men need only do nothing!
- the peptide has to be injected within hours of -- or even before -- the infection. That means it's only likely to be useful in a hospital setting.
- anything that boosts immune response in a non-specific way runs the risk of causing over-reaction, at least in some people. (Think about the six healthy volunteers in England who nearly died because of an unexpected immune response to the drug they were testing.) Again, that means it'll likely only be usable in a closely supervised, hospital setting.
- since the publication is appearing in one of the Nature journals, you can be pretty sure this does exactly what it says it does, and really is a breakthrough for the particular immune response in question.
- re the commenter earlier who said there was no evidence of antibiotic resistance appearing except due to hospital misuse: total claptrap. Just one example: antibiotic resistance has been documented developing in chickens and cattle due to antibiotics in the feed. Those bacteria can pass to humans. Sometimes they cause symptoms, sometimes they don't. But even when they don't, bacteria are capable of passing bits of DNA back and forth, and genes for antibiotic resistance are -- for obvious reasons -- among the likeliest to persist in bacterial populations. So, if you eat a tainted hamburger, say, or spinach, the disease-causing bacteria on that item can mix it up with the other bacteria in your gut, and there you are. Fun, huh?
...a massive super bug some day that will kill you ...
That's sounds a bit emotional. If it has any basis in scientific fact you haven't established it. I believe you're espousing the age old theory that we'll eventually destroy ourselves by playing with nature. That mad scientists with blow us all up.
When automobiles were invented, some people believed it was unhealthy and dangerous to travel faster than 30 miles an hour because it wasn't natural. People make similar arguments again cloning.
Ever since the dawn of man people have manipulated nature to their own advantage. That's how we got here today. That's why you're posting on slashdot.
Wether man is breeding cats to solve his rat problem, or genetically modifying food because he thinks it tastes better, he's always seeking to change his environment. That's who he is.
It would be foolish to say we won't eventually destroy ourselves by fooling around with fire. But what's the point of saying we will?
My mother was a nurse trained in the 40's. Since this was before major antibiotic use, significant training was about sanitation control. No wrist watches (since you might not wash), how to change bed sheets (to minimize airborne dust), and proper washing.
Now we have keyboards, remote controls, and all kinds of stuff that can't be cleaned. She died from an infection carried by improperly sterilized diagnostic equipment.
Today, hospital care seems to be more about pushing pills and foregoing the basics so it's no wonder we have resistant bugs.
First wrong statement: Overprescription of antibiotics for (presumably viral) ear infections has been strongly linked to various strains of drug resistant streptoocci and staphylococci.
This paragraph is an interesting mix of logic, illogic and just incorrect statements. While there are certainly strains of bacteria whose resistance is linked to hospital use of antibiotics, it is no where near correct to state that this is a totality or even a majority of cases. Bacteria aren't terribly bright, just persistent. Stick some antibiotics in their culture medium, wherever it happens to be, and somebody's bound to come out alive. It's just selection pressure in action. In the hospital, in the home, in the cattle yard.
Just what the hell are you talking about? While there are diseases that are due to an immune response set up by a bacterial infection, for example, rheumatic heart fever from streptococcal sore throat (and there are several others), I don't think you will find any evidence to support your claim that stomping out every bacterial infection the instant it starts (and you know this just how?) will help you in any way. In fact, for strep throat, it is quite clear that you have ten entire days after the onset of symptoms to start antibiotics in order to prevent rheumatic heart fever. While there are some interesting hints that some chronic diseases, such as atherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries) is linked to chronic low grade bacterial infections, the current longitudinal studies where they have given people antibiotics for several years on a regular basis have failed to show any real decrease in heart disease. There are a number of flaws in these studies, the most striking is that they have been too short (one or two years) but my point is that simply taking antibiotics at the first instant of an infection (and again, how to you know this??) doesn't seem to help the immune system modulated damage. It's way harder than that.
And for all of the rest of you folks. The living organism isn't just a petri dish, the immune system modulates and in fact is responsible for most of the clearance of bacterial infections. You don't have to kill every damned little microorganism, in fact, if you do you tend to create other problems. You just have to let the immune system get an upper hand. It's a very complicated problem. Anybody here taken a good, hard look at what we know about the immune system lately? Your head will asplode. We don't know nearly as much as we need to in order to deal with the complex problem of bacterial
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
You need to keep in mind just how dangerous and deadly infections can be. I mean, people used to die from a relatively minor puncture wound or similar back before antibiotics.
If there is abuse of antibiotics, it is with livestock and perhaps the elderly. Average people are not getting antibiotics for the "sniffles."
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death