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Potential Cure For Antibiotic Resistant Infections
kpw10 writes to let us know about research to be published this week that offers hope in the battle against multi-drug-resistant bacteria. "Researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have discovered that two drugs used to treat bone loss in old folks can both kill and short-circuit the 'sex life' of antibiotic-resistant bacteria blamed for nearly 100,000 hospital deaths across the country each year."
what happens when the bugs become resistant to these two drugs as well?
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
It's always good to see existing drugs being used in new ways, because it shortens the amount of time it takes to get the treatment to market.
Um, doesn't marriage do the same thing?
Just asking, because it would certainly save a lot of money if we just get these bacteria to marry.
The Kai's Semi-Updated Website Thingy
so the drugs prevent genetic transer through the sex pilli so that the bacteria can not share genes and recombine them into new genes/phenotypes. that isnt a cure, it will slow thigns down but really I doubt all the drug resistant bacteria are suceptable to it and even if they were it will eventually be overcome and as a defense, become meaningless. now if we found a way to make bacteriophages induce this effect in bacteria THEN we might have a chance. viruses mutate and evolve along with their hosts and might actually put a damper on the epidemic. there are however, other ways of transferring DNA, the most important of which in this case is DNA transferred by way of bacteriophage. the phages don't do it "intentionally" it is just a consequence of their reproduction. in this case, if the drugs do work, they will fail in preventing DNA transfer through other mechanisms [there are a lot of ways this can happen]
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
The problem that is said to cause drug resistant bacteria is over use - too many people taking the drug when they don't really need it to kill bacteria. And in this case the "cure" we're being offered is a drug that's in even wider use, now it will not only be used to treat the resistant drugs but will continue to be used widely to treat bone loss in old people (senile citizens). So it's not just a matter of what happens when the bugs become resistant, but that the resistance is on a fast track!
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
So, the few bugs that escape this new form of microbial torture will simply become stronger and even more resistant. Great. I am not a biologist, but are there any other ways of getting around this war of escalation?
Maybe scientists could find some other critter that the bugs like better, like cockroaches or the small dogs that live in women's purses.
I'm a skeptic about a lot of things in medicine (I live in that world), especially "wonder drugs", and the writer of TFA demonstrates his limited skills in microbiology enough to make me cringe. But the science here is going to be fun to see.
Don't get me wrong - we need to know the doses, the regimen, the side effects at antimicrobial dosing, and all the rest of the nuts-and-bolts pharmacology. On the other hand, the putative mechanism, which is to interfere with sharing of genes between bacteria, is in itself ground-breaking. Used properly (that is, not overused and used with care), this could prevent rapid resistance emergence in bacteria where the treatment itself takes weeks to months (osteomyelitis, for example, or infection with certain stubborn bugs). These drugs (etidronate and pamidronate) have their own not-insignificant side effect profile, of course, and there are no guarantees at this stage.
I'll be interested in the actual research, because TFA is filtered through a layer of ignorance and sensationalism, but it sounds interesting.
...also a proven way to virtually extinguish one's sex life.
Hopefully the doctors who prescribe this new cure won't just pump the environment full of it at any sign of anything wrong, the way generations of their fellow doctors have antibiotics to create today's resistant "superbugs". Every time around this treadmill it's harder to kill the new superbugs, and the more people get sick and die from them.
--
make install -not war
just put them in an autoclave.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
So we become the Vidiians when we use the Phage....
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
both kill and short-circuit the 'sex life' Do they extract the drug from slashdot readers? :-P
Just a nitpick, but anti-biotics don't really help fight against viruses.
News about the Kettle Open Source project: on my blog
Now I'm not a doctor, but it seems to me that (as is usually the case) it's not that simple. Among the things that come to mind:
1. Drug resistant bacteria aren't as much caused by taking too many antibiotics, but by taking too little of an antibiotic. People take the antibiotic for 2-3 days, then they feel better, and figure out "why bother taking the rest?" Or they take an antibiotic, it makes them feel worse, skip the rest of the treatment because they know better than the doctor. Etc.
Problem is, they have a shitload of bacteria left at that point.
Will someone decide to skip their bone loss drugs too? Probably, but I'd assume somewhat fewer.
2. The fact that it's already widely used to treat bone loss, should probably tell us that if it was that easy to develop resistance to it, it would have happened already. Not saying it's impossible to, but it might just take a lot more time.
3. The relatively fast development of resistance is massively aided by the fact that bacteria can exchange genes. (Hence the jab about inhibiting their sex life.) So basically once one develops resistance, it can pass that around.
Something that attacks that very mechanism, might slow down the rate of developing and spreading resistance a lot.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
It's easy to be a sceptic and ask about 'and what about when the bugs become resistant to this'. As a person who had his life ruined by MRSA, I know too well the impact these types of infection have on individuals and families. Anything that can extend the reach of antibiotics (particularly the less toxic ones - I was only 2 or 3 days off being killed by the antibiotic that beat my infection) and decrease the chance of resistance is a good thing.
Hopefully this won't be used promiscuously, and I hope they'll work out the interactions with other treatments, as quite often treatment is multi-modal.
I wouldn't wish what I go through due to MRSA on anyone (except my stepfather, but that's another story altogether.
in simple life forms, such as bacteria, the mutations neccesary to change the organism in a useful way can happen in far fewer generations. combined with the speed at which these ateria reproduce it is only a matter of time before they adapt to this new treatment. the trick is staying ahead of them-- which is difficult.
This is a surprising number yes, I bet they save many more than that though. Thats why I still go to the doctor.
100K deaths per year, thats more than an order of magnitude than the number of deaths attributed to terrorism in the last decade. Why are they telling us terrorists are dangerous? Imagine the lives saved if we poured half a trillion dollars to combat this, plus no armed forces casualties and no need to tap our phones or sniff our internet traffic.
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
Yes, why would there be a lot of deaths in the place all the really sick people go to? Anything so obvious must be an evil plot.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
...but until you've had an opportunity to get up close and personal with CA-MRSA, you DO NOT know how much fun you are missing.
Starts out like an ingrown hair or pimple. Might even be a spider bite. Then it gets angry. Take a large marble...light it on fire and have it surgically planted underneath, say, two layers of skin. Day three and the redness is now inches in diameter and the bump is still growing and...damn! It hurts! Burns like hell! Pimple my ass! Get that thing out of there! You can't sleep from the pain and you find yourself wondering which would be the better method to dig it out: kitchen cutlery or claw-hammer. In any case, if you don't have a doctor lance it, you're going to have to do it yourself.
Day four and it is open, draining and talk about cheese!! The stuff draining from the now open wound is so toxic, it blisters the surrounding skin. Makes it a bit difficult to remember to trash your clothes, bedsheets, etc., but at least the burning has lessened...a bit.
Ten or twelve days later, after finally getting on an anti-biotic (tetracycline?) that can put up a fight, the fluid draining out is almost stopped, the redness is almost gone and a bit of scar tissue is starting to form. Good news is, now that you know the routine, you can put up a slightly better fight next time - and there will be a next time...unless you died from this incident, of course. You did wash your hands before you helped your kids get dressed this morning, right...?
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL9910/S00096.htm ... It is embarrassing when western science is out-trumped, especially by the "communists". Usually, when out-trumped, we don't tell anyone. That's what happened here. Not only did we not have the nous to start a western programme in bacteriophage research; we looked the other way when the files of phials threatened to be destroyed following the breakup of the Soviet Union, and during the little reported civil war that engulfed Georgia a few years ago. So much for the knowledge economies of the west. How can such valuable knowledge be so cheap?"
"Phage Therapy: where communism succeeded and capitalism failed. Western capitalism has another kind of correctness that can be at least as disabling; a correctness based on profit, and an unwillingness to check the growth of an industry that is too lucrative to too many people. The story of antibiotics is becoming one of those stories. An elementary application of Evolution 101 tells us that bacteria evolve. In an antibiotic-rich environment, selective pressure favours those bacteria strains that are resistant to antibiotics. It's virtually a tautology. The wonder is that we have got away with abusing antibiotic therapy for so long. The antibiotic-resistant superbugs have now arrived. The use of antibiotics as a cure-all is more stupid than anything that happened in the name of Lysenko. Antibiotic therapy used as anything other than a backup medicine defies the basic laws of evolution. As a general means of treating bacterial infections (and as food additives), the use of antibiotics only makes sense in terms of creationist biology. In creation science, all species are fixed. Antibiotic A will cure disease A for all of the time that God grants us.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phage_therapy
"Phage therapy is the therapeutic use of lytic bacteriophages to treat pathogenic bacterial infections. Bacteriophages, or "phages" are viruses that invade only bacterial cells and, in the case of lytic phages, cause the bacterium to burst and die, thus releasing more phages. Phage therapy is one of the viable alternatives to antibiotics, being developed for clinical use in the 21st century by many research groups in Europe and the US. After having been extensively used and developed mainly in former Soviet Union countries for about 90 years, phage therapy is now becoming more available in other countries such as USA for a variety of bacterial and poly-microbial biofilm infections.[1] Phage therapy has many applications in human medicine as well as dentistry, veterinary science and agriculture."
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
It is fact that some avoidable deaths are caused by healthcare practitioners, though efforts are made to minimize this. Unfortunately, the US does pretty poorly in this regard, in comparison to other nations with "1st world" healthcare systems.
I don't agree with the OP that doctors are to be avoided -- but I do believe that patients should educate themselves and question the actions of their doctors, particularly wrt prescriptions. There's a reason pharmacists, and not doctors, are the most trusted professionals in the US.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Hurry! Get this medicine to Andorra before it's too late!
Well, AFAIK because
1. It gives it more time to exchange genes with the other 500 million bacteria.
2. Because the immune system also has a lot more other targets and might miss it long enough to get coughed/sneezed/whatever out.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Hang on there! This logic of combinations of drugs and such has been tried for a long time. The results always rapidly decline in value. Even if this combination works for now, it will fail in a short period of time.
There is a better way! the USA Laser guys have a tool that could best be described as the Atom Bomb of medicine. It is a very simple system that exposes a person to an intense short duration flash from an IR laser. This device does several wonderful things. The first is that it essentially sterilizes the exposed zone of the person from most bacteria and virus agents. This is really profound and very nearly instantaneous. The next effect is by photoelectric effect it takes the cells of the person in the area exposed and drives them up to full operational energy essentially stopping any tissue destruction cascades.
This process causes nearly instant reduction of edema in exposed tissue. Yes our soldiers exposed to traumatic brain injury could be healed this way because the laser is intense enough to shine right through a person's head. This system also supports rapid tissue healing at rates in the order of 10 times normal. Tissue differentiation to the correct tissue type rather than scar or adhesion types is also greatly improved.
Antibiotics are well named. They are anti-life. This problem with using them in treatment means that their use is a trade off between the death they cause in a patient vs the death they cause in the infectious agent. Wouldn't something better be a good idea?
Never Politically Correct ~ I prefer the facts If you don't like what I say, get a life, or comment yourself.
And they figured this out how? The obvious thought is that the old people with bone loss weren't dying nearly as fast as the other, otherwise, healthy patients.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I hope you never get jock itch.
What if the Hokey Pokey really is what it's all about?
It should. White willow bark is basically identical to aspirin, except that it has crappy quality control and inconsistent dosing, and costs a lot more.
Astragalus and Oscillicoxinum for flu and colds, as well as various homeopathics.
You forgot "witchcraft" and "UFOs", as long as we're on the subject of things that have no legitimate medical application.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
The problem with your idea is that the infection is usually internal. If you have a plan for getting the Lysol into your body, please don't hesitate to not tell me.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I myself spent six months in a hospital after being diagnosed w/ MRSA. Actually, I should clarify that and state that at first they treated it as a NON-methycillin resistant Staph A. infection using heavy doses of a pretty tough antibiotic....only after weeks of therapy when they found it continued to spread (I had endocarditis...and it had also spread to two vertebrae in my neck causing temporary paralysis, my knees, my lungs, etc....it was everywhere) they finally realized they had to switch to a new drug. That took 3 months to recover from and I had multiple surgeries in between. Then, as they sent me home, they gave me an additional script for levofloxin "just in case" and was advised to take it until I ran out. Well, they fucked up and filled the script w/ three times the amount required. I didnt realize this (shame on me) until I was 2/3 of the way through. By then I had suffered from serious side effects from that antibiotic (although not as badly as many people have suffered from levofloxin). I am fairly sure I didnt need that last prescription at all. And levofloxin is no lightweight antibiotic (one of the main drugs used to treat anthrax among other things) but the doctors I saw always seemed like they felt they 'had' to do 'something' and that meant writing a script. Hell, when I left the hospital after 6 months I had lost all my good lean weight and looked like shit. (Im sure the hospital food didnt help there....wasnt much protein in what I was getting) I was weak as hell and it took me 6 more months to recover at home to the point where I could actually leave the house and/or stand and move around for more than 15 mins or so. The docs surmised that I probably picked up the infection while in the hospital getting my back stitched up after it had been sliced up pretty bad. I remember thinking that they didnt seem to clean the wound as thoroughly as I would have thought....and docs went from patient to patient in the ER sometimes forgetting to change latex gloves, etc. I had to ask one doc to change his gloves before touching the wound and I remember he was not at all happy to hear that, but he complied. That infection almost killed me 3 times during that six months. But the antibiotics they used at first did nothing but compound the problem...my kidneys almost failed at one point, strain on other organs, etc not attributed to the Staph A. It sucked. I've recovered from it with just the scars on my back, legs, chest, etc where they performed surgery, but Im told my heart is as healthy or even healthier now than it ever was (Im a gym rat who seriously took to cardio after my recovery to lose the pot belly I started to get while lying in a bed 24hrs a day for 6 months) so Im pretty lucky in that sense as many people I have met or corresponded with have suffered a lot more lasting effects. Many from the overprescribing of levofloxin or other floroquinones. So any new treatment that doesnt include traditional antibiotics is a huge plus in my opinion. I also remember reading in the Boston Globe last year about a company that was producing a drug called Cubicin (sp?) that essentially worked by passing through the Staph cell wall and rendering it unable to reproduce. I havent heard anything else about that drug since, but hopefully something has come from it. -Crash