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Gonorrhea As the Next Superbug
WrongSizeGlass writes "Reuters is reporting that Gonorrhea risks becoming a superbug: 'The sexually transmitted disease gonorrhea risks becoming a drug-resistant "superbug" if doctors do not devise new ways of treating it, a leading sexual health expert said.'"
wrong, throat gonorrhea is quite common, and transmissible to your penis via oral sex.
Wrong. Antibiotics are there to kill off all the non-resistant strains until the amount of bacteria low enough so the immune system can take care of the rest, this way preventing that the resistant strains survive.
If an antibiotic treatment suddenly stops before all non-resistant strains were killed, the resistant strains survive and multiply and soon become dominant strains.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
Teaching practices need to promote the ideal circumstances, and count on the opposite. In the case of sexual education, promote abstinence, explain the array of potential consequences (which can occur despite the use of condoms), and make sure they know what their contraceptive options are, as well as how to go about getting them-- After all, even if they don't take this new found knowledge and immediately go out to copulate, this information will still be useful when they get married.
Really, in a perfect world, the responsibility for teaching children about sex would fall squarely on the parents, but we just can't count on the parents doing that part of their job. Maybe it's because we have horrible parents who are so bad at their tasks because their own parents were no good at it, or maybe it's because our culture regards sex as a generally impolite subject which parents are generally content to ignore. One way or another, we've failed on the whole subject for a couple of generations now, and the consequence is that each successive generation is slightly more loose than the one that came before (on the other hand, I'm not certain that the current youth is quite as promiscuous as the "FREE LOVE" generation of the 60's, but then, I've only born distant witness to the younger of the two). One way or another, something needs to be fixed.
Learning about brewing beer, by brewing beer.
This is not "alternative medical thinking." Alternative Medical Thinking would be making a homeopathic yogurt dilution and believing that the spirit of the yogurt was imprinted on the solvent. Doctors (like Dr. Drew) are professionals, just like programmers. They can be wrong, or behind the times, or attention-grabbing without actually being representative of the state of their field.
Treating and encouraging your natural bacterial flora is mainstream medicine, and the yogurt trick for encouraging health "down there" is something a lot of doctors will pass along. I can't speak to your personal experience, but anecdotes =/= mainstream medicine. Your family physician will probably also tell you to eat some yogurt when they give you antibiotics to clear up some strep throat or another nasty bacteria, because it'll help replenish the good bacteria in your gut that you have been eliminating, and keep you from getting a monster case of the runs.
And there are the studies on GM bacteria mouthwashes, to colonize your mouth with bacteria that out-compete your old, cavity-causing flora with something safer. And the studies that show that while we've generally eliminated the bacteria that cause stomach ulcers, we've also caused some downstream problems because those bacteria were part of a balancing act in the ecosystem in there. The bacterial flora are a hot areas of research.
I'm not a doctor, but I have a degree in bioengineering, and I have stayed at a Holiday Inn Express.
Repetition does not transform a lie into the truth. - FDR