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."

Comments

Source?

[Piedramente]

Why do I have a hard time trusting a source like "curedeath.com"?

Re:Headline missing a keyword

[Seumas]

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).

Over-prescribed

[SpiffyMarc]

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.

Re:Over-prescribed

[TubeSteak]

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.

The #1 problem for Doctors is:
1. patient takes meds
2. patient starts to feel better
3. patient stops

Patients who do not finish their course of medication, do not kill all the bacteria.

Maybe if people were compliant with Doctors' orders you wouldn't have resistant strains cropping up.

It's easy to blame the doctors, try looking beyond that.

Re:Over-prescribed

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Actually, stopping when you feel better is a pretty good idea. The bug is gone, and the body will take care of the rest. The more time you expose organisms to antibiotics, the more time they have to adapt to it.

It doesn't work that way. When you're infected, some of the bacteria have more resistance than others -- resistance is a fairly complicated trait; it's not binary. So if you stop "as soon as you feel better," what this means is that you've killed off just enough of the least resistant bacteria so that you don't notice the symptoms of infection any more; there are still plenty of somewhat-more-but-not-completely resistant bacteria in your body, and you've created a massive selective pressure favoring those strains. Whereas if you finish the prescribed course of antibiotics, you're wiping out all but the very most resistant -- and that's likely to be a fairly small number, which your immune system can indeed deal with on its own, now that most of the bacteria overall are out of they way.

I hate to bring up such a politically charged analogy, but this is the best way I can think of to explain it: suppose you're planning to invade a country and eliminate all resistance. You have two courses of action available:

(a) Attack, keep attacking, kill anyone who resists, and even after visible resistance has ceased, keep aggressively patrolling every square foot of the country until well after you're sure that everyone who might oppose your rule is dead.

(b) Attack, kill off the most visible opponents, ease up until a rebellion starts, kill a few more people until things quiet down, ease up until a rebellion starts, kill a few more people ...

Which option do you think is likely to be most effective? Conversely, which one do you think is most likely to produce a hardened and pretty much ineradicable resistance? Hint: (b) is pretty much what people who stop taking antibiotics as soon as they feel better are doing.

Of course, my analogy should only be interpreted in medical terms. Doesn't have anything to do with anything else that's going on in the world. Uh-uh. Not a bit. No sirree.

Clean = Immune Retardation

[PixieDust]

Part of the reason Antibiotics have been overprescribed is in our world of super ultra hygeine concious society, people are killing off all the germs they can everywhere. People sanitize their hands 50 times a day. This is all well and good, and healthy, but it also causes a problem. Without exposure to various germs, bacteria, etc. people's immune systems actually atrophy. So when they get a little bug that a 'normal' immune system could kick without much trouble, theirs can't, or they fraek out because they are ultra health concious, so they go to the Dr. Dr sees what's going on, prescribes an anti-biotic because John Q and Sally public are so afraid to go a few weeks with the sniffles and let it run their course.

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.

Not a replacement

[iamacat]

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.

Re:Waaa, Doctor Help Me

[wkk2]

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.

Re:Waaa, Doctor Help Me

[ColdWetDog]

Actually, there has never ever ever ever been any causal link between antibiotic prescriptions for personal, in-home use and the development of antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria. Given the number of studies by people trying to scare people away from antibioitics, it is likely that such a link simply does not exist, as it would likely have been found by now if it did.

First wrong statement: Overprescription of antibiotics for (presumably viral) ear infections has been strongly linked to various strains of drug resistant streptoocci and staphylococci.

Antibiotic resistance develops as a direct result of hospital use of antibiotics. Unfortunately, hospital use usually equates with life-threatening. The reason that resistant strains take hold in hospitals is that you have a higher concentration of sick people breathing the same air, using some of the same shared facilities, etc. with doctors and nurses moving from patient to patient. As much as they try to minimize the spread of illness among patients, it still occurs, and unlike in your home, the people in the hospital are often already sick or in poor health, and are thus more susceptible to bacteria that (barely) survived a round of antibiotics.

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.

By contrast, letting yourself "wait a few days while you get better" from bacterial infections has been linked to numerous diseases, including several varieties of arthritis, rheumatic fever, Pelvic Inflammatory Disease, and even heart damage. Waiting it out is absolutely the worst thing you can do.

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