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Drug-Resistant Superbugs Sweeping Across Europe
Pierre Bezukhov writes "Klebsiella pneumoniae is a common cause of pneumonia, urinary tract, and bloodstream infections in hospital patients. The superbug form is resistant even to a class of medicines called carbapenems, the most powerful known antibiotics, which are usually reserved by doctors as a last line of defense. The ECDC said several EU member states were now reporting that between 15 and up to 50 percent of K. pneumoniae from bloodstream infections were resistant to carbapenems. To a large extent, antibiotic resistance is driven by the misuse and overuse of antibiotics, which encourages bacteria to develop new ways of overcoming them. Experts say primary care doctors are partly to blame for prescribing antibiotics for patients who demand them unnecessarily, and hospitals are also guilty of overuse."
Any reason why this would not be the case in the US?
So now we can train bugs to say no to drugs, next step is to move to animals and then finally humans!
I wonder if such a common thing as antibiotic soap can increase resistance over a period of time.
The same whiny hypochondriacal medieval idiots who demand antibiotics to fight a virus.
I often think that 19th century physicians had it figured out. Blue pill (placebo), slime draught (nasty tasting placebo) and let some blood. Treat the root cause, i.e. the hypochondria.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
> which encourages bacteria to develop new ways of overcoming them.
which encourages bacteria to **evolve** new ways of overcoming them.
What's the "K"? You can only abbreviate it if you've already written it in full beforehand
All true but the majority of resistant strains come from countries where antibiotics are unregulated (i.e. you can buy them over the counter without prescription)
The concern centers on farmers' routine use of antibiotics. Its use on livestock accounts for roughly half of the 25,000 tons produced in the United States each year. - link -
The question of whether we are creating ‘resistances' in zoomatic organisms (that affect both species) out in the feedlot and pastures and passing this on to humans with veterinary use of drugs, however, is still a very up-in-the air question. - link -
In all cases where resistance has been traced to its source, it turns out to be agribusiness. Literally tons of the latest antibiotics are used by agribusiness in feedlots and other animal husbandry to compensate for crowding and filthy conditions. The resistant bacteria find their way into our lives via the food we eat, which is contaminated with them. Hospitals, clinics and physicians are not to blame, and denying humans the antibiotics they need to fight infection will not affect the problem. The only real solution would be to stop agribusiness from these abusive pracrtises, but this isn't going to happen because the profits being made are too high.
So if we eat meat that has been fed antibiotics, it will effect our resistances as well?
Bacteria on the continent are allowed a little antibiotics with meals even at a young age, so they grow up with a much more mature attitude towards it. That's why they're much better at handling antibiotics than British and American bacteria.
To a large extent, antibiotic resistance is driven by the misuse and overuse of antibiotics, which encourages bacteria to develop new ways of overcoming them.
Only someone who doesn't understand evolution can say such nonsense. Bacteria don't "react" to antibiotics. There are no little "scientist bacteria" wearing tiny lab coats trying to come up with ways to make themselves and other bacteria immune to some antibiotic. Antibiotic effectiveness is driven down simply by natural selection. When a colony of bacteria is exposed to some antibiotics, the ones that aren't immune die, period. The ones that already had immunity survive, and eventually reproduce (their offspring also being immune to that antibiotic). They weren't "encouraged to become resistant", they already were resistant. In fact, it's been shown that there are antibiotic-resistant bacteria even in ice cores that pre-date the existence of humans.
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/08/superbugs-predate-wonder-drugs.html
Yes, antibiotic overuse can lead to an increase in the number of resistant bacteria (by killing their non-resistant competitors), but it's not the antibiotics that create the resistance.
oversimplified.
It's based on the idea, seen in insects with pesticide use, that if you kill x percentage of insects, some may survive and their offspring may have a much higher level of tolerance, meaning more pesticides are needed to kill the insects. No doubt this happens with bacteria too and is *a* cause of antibiotic resistance.
Consider that livestock may be given antibiotics, and they may have bacteria, like E. coli or Salmonella sps which can make humans ill. This represents an additional vector not generally covered in analysis.
However there may be several other big issues that are not currently included in the analysis. Many species of bacteria are known to assimilate genetic material from other bacteria even from other genuses. This means that there is a possibility that antibiotic resistance can spread between bacterial species as a result of hospital waste, causing a form of genetic pollution.
Nature is fundamentally more complex than we can model. Any sufficiently complex model would be nature itself.
However, the rise of superbugs is fascinating to watch.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Also I don't think we *know* what sorts of antibiotic resistance may be created in other countries through this practice. Consider simply that there are bugs that can use livestock and humans as hosts, and our insistence on routine feed of antibiotics to animals should be quite frightening.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Feedlot animals, folks. They consume more antibiotics than all the humans combined.
I've had a doctor tell me that I / my kid has a bacterial infection but it's not that serious, so the best option is to rest and let the body's own immune system take care of it.
Yet, something tells me that those doctors would have prescribed antibiotics if I had cluelessly demanded that I get 'proper medicine'...
.: Max Romantschuk
While I think there are concerns that the antibiotics for livestock may get passed on to people a little bit through the meat it's more that some bacteria affect both people and livestock.
Create a resistance in the bacteria (to the antibiotics) attacking the livestock and then, maybe, the new and improved bacteria could be passed to humans (either from the animals themselves or improper handling of the raw meat).
And farmers pretty much feed all of their animals antibiotics because it's easier? cheaper? than only feeding it to animals once they're sick (in general it's a lot harder to tell when an animal is sick than a human). Or at least that's my understanding, I could be wrong.
Antibiotics tend to be big, complex molecules. They won't last long in the organism, and they'll last even less time in the oven.
It's about time some drug company raids the old Russia Bacteriophage Labs. The companies could charge almost anything to cure antibiotic resistant infections. Also, Russian researchers are looking for better pay abroad but they will still be settle for less then most 1st world researchers. Of course, maybe it's lucky we don't have a cheap supply of Bacteriophage because we would probably over use that too. Then again, the virus would mutate to adapt to the bacterias adaptations. Of course the mutations could also lead to super virus that attacks the human host. But it would be wise to develop a protocol for developing Bacteriophage to attack dangerous resistant infections. And only using it in extreme cases.
Now if only people understood it better, so that they didn't use antibiotics in absolutely everything and expect antibiotics the moment they get a sniffle. Bacteria have been around for billions of years. They are the most successful reproduction and evolution machines on the planet. In a battle between bacterial evolution and human ingenuity we are going to lose SO bad if we are complacent.
Not a parasite bug but a bacteria. The human body is not a piece of software to call every problem a bug.
Fascinating until some gets into a casual scrape or cut in your skin...
Another cost of our overly-medicating society is that we forget how important it is to keep our immune systems healthy. We scrub and clean and sanitize everything at every turn thinking we can limit or even eliminate those dastardly bacteria which are always bad. (Not all bacteria are bad... how is the over-use of antibiotics harming the good bacteria we depend on?)
Good practices and good hygiene, of course, are important things to maintain... foods should be cooked and handled properly. Hands and bodies kept clean as well. But "sanitized" is just going too far in most cases. And so when people get sick, they have untrained immune systems which don't react as well as it should which necessitates the use of antibiotics.
George Carlin saw this problem long, long ago when he did his "swimming in raw sewage" routine. His point was to keep the immune system operating and working well. My point is that we can't seek to eliminate all "bad things" without serious consequence which includes upsetting nature's balances. Instead we should seek to coexist with bacteria in our world and seek ways to maintain a healthy balance. Instead, people seek to dominate and eliminate "their enemies" without considering the long term consequences of such reactions.
People who think our ingestion of antibiotics from animals is a factor in antibiotic resistance are crackpots who don't pay attention to the fact that we've been eating trace amounts of penicillin for tens of thousands of years. That's not a serious concern. There are however a few serious concerns:
1) Some bugs like E coli and Salmonella sps can be hosted in animals or humans. Antibiotic resistance they pick up in animals will be a factor when the human gets sick.
2) Some bugs are known to swap DNA. This means that antibiotic resistance in a harmless bug could turn up in a harmful one later.
3) Bugs which are harmless today could jump species and become harmful tomorrow.
4) Environmental pollution around concentrated animal feeding operations could lead to antibiotic resistance in soil-borne bacteria.
Now, in the US, there is supposed to be a clear separation between classes of antibiotics used on animals and those used on people, although this is more porous than we might like to think. There are however no guarantees that other countries have the exact same divisions. Moreover even assuming that this is the case, it deprives us humans of the effectiveness of certain classes of antibiotics which might prove useful in the future.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
I think people are oversimplifying by talking about "stupid" parents. The truth is that since antibiotics and antivirals have few side-effects and are cheap to produce, it's individually rational for people to use them. But when everyone uses them, we get lots of resistance.
This is a sobering article. A quarter of people think antibiotics cure colds? Most of them know about antibiotic resistance in hospitals, but apparently don't make the connection?
You know, humans have a big advantage over bacteria: we're smart. But if people don't use their brain, the bacteria are going to win eventually anyway. They've been around a lot longer than humans.
We keep sterilizing and over-cleaning everything in hospitals (ie some UK ones where to enter sections is like entering a military biohazard zone), plus the abuse of antibiotics of course. Proper sterlization should occour just before a surgery, the rest should be treated just like any other public space ,with the exception of case specific illnesses. Not to mention that is the nasty chemicals that will give you a cancer more likely (see the overcleaning and hodgkin lymphoma connection) not a common bio treat, to which we evolved in thousands of years in resistence. Also medical community should start to think about dropping wide spectrum antibiotics in favor of phages viruses, which are a much better specific option to treat specific bacteria at a time, with a basically 100% success rate...
How come almost nobody mentions the farmers who stuff their livestock with so many antibiotics from birth to slaughter that then end up not only in the meat, but in water supplies because of runoff from the farms? I get more antibiotics from a meal at a steak house than I have ever gotten from my doctor. And it's that small steady dose that the bugs use to build up resistance.
I agree with your points about the immune system and sanitizing everything. I would go further and say I enjoy beef tartare, sashimi, and good old fashioned home-made eggnog, plus a few scandinavian desserts with raw eggs.
I would however like to point out that with simple care, most bacterial infections can be treated without antibiotics. The last few times I have had skin infections, I have used sterilized kitchen knives to lance the infection and hot salt water to draw fluids, etc, out, and I got better at least as fast as I would have with antibiotics. I also travel a LOT and have had E coli and possibly even a mild case of cholera. None of these need to be treated with antibiotics either (with cholera the key concern is hydration, and with any diarrhea I have found the key is to go off all foods for a while to let one's immune system get a grip on what's in the digestive tract.
We use antibiotics a lot when we don't really have to, because we believe in modern medicine and all of that, and because it's easier than teaching people to soak infected fingers in hot salt water.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Just adding to that last comment. One of the big issues with antibiotics is that they often target harmless bacteria as well as bad ones. This means impoverished microbial biodiversity, which means it is easier to get infected again with something else. And so one intervention leads to another.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Recent inspections in Germany showed that over 90% of all chicken produced for consumption contain remains of antibiotics. So I guess you are right.
http://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/mensch/0,1518,797970,00.html (german),
http://de.babelfish.yahoo.com/translate_url?doit=done&tt=url&intl=1&fr=bf-home&trurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.spiegel.de%2Fwissenschaft%2Fmensch%2F0%2C1518%2C797970%2C00.html&lp=de_en&btnTrUrl=%C3%9Cbersetzen (Yahoo Babelfish Translation)
Nope, I think you mistook me for someone else.
There is no question at all that synthetic antibacterial substances, often added to consumer products, will directly breed resistant bacteria.
As one ubiquitous example, please research triclosan's effects on bacterial biology, as well as its environmental impact. Triclosan will degrade into dioxin and other carcinogens when exposed to sunlight. The proof is in the pudding.
Lastly, even if there were such a synthetic additive which somehow did not potentiate microbial resistance, it would still likely add to our constant daily bombardment of carcinogens.
Trading short term pathology for a longer term pathology, which costs hundreds of billions of dollars annually to deal with, is not a very wise public health strategy. There are no short cuts.
"The illegal we can do right now; the unconstitutional will take a little longer." --Henry Kissinger
It should be illegal for doctors to listen to patients on drug choices and procedure selection.
"that we've been eating trace amounts of penicillin for tens of thousands of years."
Some modern antibiotics can get into the soft tissue of an animal and stay there until it is slaughtered and can then survive the cooking process. Penicillin can't.
I have argued here and elsewhere that there is a high costs to our legal system. Sadly, just about every liberal screams that it only costs 3%. But the issue is that due to quick ability to sue, docs have adopted protective medicine. Not protection for the patient, but protection against lawsuits. As such, they give a number of antibiotics that we would not do.
However, a big issue is that ag makes propholatic use of antibiotics. That is more true in Asia esp. china, than it is anywhere else.
That is what is about cause a massive lowering of the world population.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
NO, it is a big concern, it was soil bacteria being exposed to penicillin *not* human pathogens, and this makes all the difference.
Worse bacteria under stress have a horrible habit of taking up random bits of DNA from the environment, and the non human safe antibiotics have large amounts of DNA from the resistant bacteria used to produce them. This proses of DNA uptake is bad for most members of the colony but as stress is often caused by a chemical attack from another competing bacterium it increases the chance of a subset of the colony surviving by stealing resistance from dead members of the attacking rivals.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phage_therapy And the bacteriophages will evolve alongside the bacteria they are designed to kill. Evolution will do the work for us.
Just think about it. Within 50 years all disease will be conquered. We still probably won't fully comprehend the necessary symbiotic relationship between germs, our gut flora and our bodies but we will understand profoundly better. But the big thing will be able to supplement our immune system but in a direct directed way that no germ can compensate for. We will be able to identify viruses and bacteria within hours and create artificial antibodies, aka germs that fight germs. All within hours. Cancer? A thing of the past.
But we will still get colds and the flu because we will let it happen. Since our bodies were designed to get sick and fight battles which develop the immune system naturally. But at the point of it becoming life threatening a visit to the doctor would cure it. Antibiotics will work again because we will systematically eliminate all the human caused drug resistant strains.
A hundred years from now a man will be able to be virtually immortal. Everyone will have to be artificially sterilized. To have children you would need to give up your immortality. For a hundred years after that society will be fractured into different experiments where people try to balance life with relative levels of healthcare and dying and the ability to have children. Most people will probably choose to die after 300 years. Automated manufacturing has reached the point where we really won't need very many people involved. People will have more free time and I think creativity will become the biggest commodity. And as people get older they will become more and more bored. Some people will choose to die, others will simple have their minds wiped either permanently or temporarily. Others will choose to live with the risk of a random death and or doing dangerous things. I don't think there will be only one solution.
And while it may happen that someone or some group decides to reduce the population I think the biggest problem with immortality is boredom as I have already put forward. And the solution to boredom is lots of creative minds in combination with minds to entertain.
I'm astounded this isn't more widely known here and in the medical community.
Bacteriophages are a pretty effecive way of killing off just about any bacteria.
They are event targetet at a spesific bacteria, rather than the "carpet bombing" approach of normal Antibiotics.
Most of the forms of Christianity in the EU have no qualms with the theory of evolution.
This has been banned in the EU (for the last 5 years).
My husband almost never gets sick, but when he does, it's rarely a minor illness. A little over two weeks ago, he came down with a very severe, very rapidly-progressing respiratory infection. Within a period of 96 hours, it went from a mild cough with no fever to severe pneumonia and a fever over 40C. The doctor prescribed amoxicillin/clavulanic acid on the morning of the third day, but it didn't really have any effect. My husband only started to get better once the doctor put him on levofloxacin a couple of days later. I think there's a very good chance his infection was caused by some kind of drug-resistant bacteria, but they didn't do any cultures, so we'll never know for sure.
On the other hand, I seem to be getting fewer and milder respiratory infections in the past few years. Even though I've always been prone to respiratory infections (I used to get bronchitis and/or pneumonia pretty much every winter), and have become quite a connoisseur of antibiotics, the worst I came down with this time was a mild ear/sinus infection and extreme fatigue. I also managed to avoid catching the H1N1 flu despite staying home to care for my daughter while she had it in 2009.
Just a few days ago I saw an interesting TV coverage: Researchers in Germany found out that animal dung containing antibiotics is problematic to the food chain because plants help microorganisms to create resistances against antibiotics.
Virtually *everything* we eat has traces of penicillin in it. The point is that if consuming trace amounts of antibiotics would cause antibiotic resistance generally, penicillin should never have worked in modern times but it did quite well (also despite sporadic uses in the ancient world I might add too).
For resistance to be developed, bacteria have to be exposed to enough of a background level to start killing the bacteria. Otherwise there is no natural selection.
"Worse bacteria under stress have a horrible habit of taking up random bits of DNA from the environment" which include those bacteria that are not human pathogens, and this is why the antibiotic pollution issues around CAFO's is such an issue, and why bacterial, whether pathogenic or not, which pick up antibiotic resistance inside animals in these areas can spread it to other bacteria which may be pathogens.
Either way the problem is entirely independent of whether or not we consume trace amounts of the antibiotics.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
"...which encourages bacteria to develop new ways of overcoming them."
This is WRONG! These mutations are random and happen anyways. There have always been drug-resistant bacteria, and there always will be. The bacteria do not change their behavior at all. The resistant strains are merely selected by the use of the drugs. In the absence of the antibiotics, those strains cannot compete with more basic strains, and would die out.
I got infected because my (new) podiatrist listened to those Bethesda Bastards.
Neither of us knew I had diabetes (slow healing etc) but how do you cut flesh around ingrown
toenails w/o antibiotics? I was a sacrifice to liberal notions of the public good.
Yes we should not prescribe anitibiotics casually. But NO operation/skin cutting/open wounds should be considered casual.
And farmers pretty much feed all of their animals antibiotics because it's easier? cheaper? than only feeding it to animals once they're sick (in general it's a lot harder to tell when an animal is sick than a human). Or at least that's my understanding, I could be wrong.
Modern industrial cattle operations feed cows corn because calorie-for-calorie it is the cheapest food available for cows. The problem is that cows evolved to eat grass, not grains, so their stomachs aren't suited to it. They come down with stomach acidosis, and they will only live about six months once the corn diet begins.
While they are alive, they get infections via the stomach ulcers. So antibiotics are mixed into the corn to somewhat protect the stomach at least long enough for the cows to get obese for market.
I didn't choose the word 'obese' lightly. Industrial cows are literally obese, which is why their meat is so fatty. Fatty meat is easier to cook, and us dumb Westerners have been trained to prefer fatty meat ("nicely marbled").
FATMOUSE + YOU = FATMOUSE
Stop the use of drugs with the animals that are overpacked in small "food industries" and that problem will go away.
Everyone who eat meat on a regular basis is eating the animal medicine to control disease in none salubrity places. Animal are not means to grow inside small overpopulated dirty places, it's why disease spread there... and it's why animal are flood with tons of different antibiotics...
Here in EU the doctors are much more "yeah, try and live with it, wouldn't want to give out too many drugs" exactly to prevent resistance, and if it happens anyway - well you are toast as well America.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
"Experts say primary care doctors are partly to blame for prescribing antibiotics for patients who demand them unnecessarily"
Sorry, I have seen from personal experience over and over again. Patients never "demand them unnecessarily".
Rather, patients go to the doctor. And the first thing the doctor almost always tries is "Here's a prescription for antibiotics." It's almost more akin to a diagnosis test. Take these and we'll determine if it's viral or baterial.
Occasionally the doctor will call for a test such as flu, strep, etc. Just recently we were concerned about my 4 yr old daughter having been bit twice by ticks in a 2 week period. Short time later all her lymph nodes were swollen, she ached, and was generally miserable.
Rather than evaluate for any of the tick born infections. Our doctor was convinced it was the flu. We knew it was NOT the flu. They did a flu test, and guess what. We were right.
The truth of the matter is most American doctors are arrogant. 1/2 the time they are wrong. And very few care about treatment, they just want to prescribe and send away.
Medicine is in a second dark age.
Now, in the US, there is supposed to be a clear separation between classes of antibiotics used on animals and those used on people, although this is more porous than we might like to think. There are however no guarantees that other countries have the exact same divisions. Moreover even assuming that this is the case, it deprives us humans of the effectiveness of certain classes of antibiotics which might prove useful in the future.
That principle was abruptly defenestrated under pressure from the agricultural sector. Even the very precious vancomycin, a "last line of defense" against multiple-drug-resistant pathogens, is being fed to cows now.
The alternative is expensive beef. Antibiotics are needed in order to fatten cows on corn. The alternatives are all much more expensive, but at least they are compatible with a cow's stomach lining. Unfortunately that would mean doubling the price of beef. If that happened, then the ballast would be shrieking at their congressmen within the hour ("McDonalds sez they hafta raise the price a'burger by two dollar!"), and boom, we're right back to corn.
The problem of antibiotic use in animals falls into the class of long-term abstract hazards that democracies cannot solve. Democracy can solve only those problems that are concrete and short-term painful.
FATMOUSE + YOU = FATMOUSE
" To a large extent, antibiotic resistance is driven by the misuse and overuse of antibiotics, which encourages bacteria to develop new ways of overcoming them. "
No. Bacteria does not "develop" new was of overcoming antibiotics. What happens is those bacteria that are already resistant survive and pass their genes on while those that are not resistant die. So, in a surival of the fittest methodollogy .... drugs become ineffective over time.
We are al F'ed.
I, too, base my health maintenance plan on comedy routines.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
super resistant deadly bacteria........
sounds like the start of a really bad zombie movie
Modern industrial cattle operations feed cows corn because calorie-for-calorie it is the cheapest food available for cows. The problem is that cows evolved to eat grass, not grains, so their stomachs aren't suited to it. They come down with stomach acidosis, and they will only live about six months once the corn diet begins.
Actually, it's more of a meat-per-acre argument. Cattle are often raised where there isn't enough land to let them graze, so they have to be fed with imported (read: more rural) food. Feeding them grass isn't feasible because the raw tonnage of grass would cost too much to transport, so they resort to corn (calorie/weight). In more rural areas, they are fed grass (every farmer I personally know).
People who think our ingestion of antibiotics from animals is a factor in antibiotic resistance are crackpots who don't pay attention to the fact that we've been eating trace amounts of penicillin for tens of thousands of years.
Trace amounts are not the concern. Cows are fed much more than "trace amounts" of bacteria. Therein lies the problem.
People who think our ingestion of antibiotics from animals is a factor in antibiotic resistance are crackpots who don't pay attention to the fact that we've been eating trace amounts of penicillin for tens of thousands of years.
Trace amounts are not the concern. Cows are fed much more than "trace amounts" of bacteria. Therein lies the problem.
I meant "cows are fed more than trace amounts of antibiotics." Too fast on the submit button.
Exactly my point, hence the concerns I outlined.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
My family has been battling MRSA for quite a while now. That shit is a bitch. Now another super bug on the loose?
I tell you what folks. Think the Black Plague. It's only a matter of time. Science turns out some wonderful things, but you can't fix stupid people. Seriously, do we believe we can beat Mother Nature? Look at gen mod crops, the pests are already adapting. We might winning for now, but we're going to loose big some day.
Have a nice day!
The last "line drugs" are surely nasty. I was hospitalized for a week with a systemic staph. infection I got via a brush burn at my grappling school. At the time, I was given vancomycin. I think it was _the_ last resort drug at the time. I was told this has now been trumped by newer antibiotics due to vancomycin resistant infections.
It is also worthy to note that this had to be administered intravenously, which means the resistant strains emerging would not be related to doctors prescribing oral antibiotics. The intravenous modality of these drugs decreases the occurrence of over-prescribing. This drug would quickly "ruin the site" as they said in the hospital, which meant the intravenous entry point had to be relocated frequently.
There was a wired article a while back about the amount of antibiotics used by farm animals in the US:
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/12/news-update-farm-animals-get-80-of-antibiotics-sold-in-us/
I would imagine this is a potentially good place to start reducing the amount of antibiotics being used. I'm no biologist, but prophylactic antibiotic use on this scale is probably unnecessary. Don't count on the farming industry to do this on their own though....
-ted
Exactly my point, hence the concerns I outlined.
Oh, I re-read your post:
People who think our ingestion of antibiotics from animals is a factor in antibiotic resistance are crackpots who don't pay attention to the fact...
I thought you were referring to animal ingestion. Carry on, we are in agreement.
I was sent a TED Talk which touches on antibiotic resistance not too long ago. It was a study about how bacteria communicate with each other, and the ways in which you could stop that communication all together. It's incredibly interesting, and may solve the problem of antibiotic resistance all together if something really comes of it.
The talk was almost 3 years ago now. Does anyone know anything about this research?
Bonnie Bassler on how bacteria "talk"
Comprehensive solutions via a competition of ideas like no other.
Posting this kind of absurd fiction only helps discredit the very real problems caused by overfeeding with grains. A six-month death sentence?
The problem began with New Deal-era crop subsidies. Naturally, every progressive treats government power like violence (if it doesn't work, just use more of it) and instead of removing the subsidies, they want to tax the meat or corn and thus continue to cause hardship.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Posting this kind of absurd fiction only helps discredit the very real problems caused by overfeeding with grains. A six-month death sentence?
The problem began with New Deal-era crop subsidies. Naturally, every progressive treats government power like violence (if it doesn't work, just use more of it) and instead of removing the subsidies, they want to tax the meat or corn and thus continue to cause hardship.
I agree that crop subsidies are teh stupid, but the corn health problems are real. In addition to acidosis, corn-fed cows have problems with liver failure from (corn) aflotoxin concentration, as well as founder and ulcers. It's not a secret either, just do some googling.
FATMOUSE + YOU = FATMOUSE
The article misrepresents the position - antibiotics don't "encourage bacteria to develop new ways of overcoming them", they just leave behind bacteria that have more resistance. It's therefore very important to go Darth Sidious on their ass and "wipe them out. All of them.", or the few that remain will multiply, unobstructed by their cream-puff peers who are all dead now.
Yes, the parent post makes an important point -- at least, the chance of fostering resistant bacteria is higher if a treatment course with antibiotics leaves any of the bacteria still alive, which might happen if the course was too short, or if the dose was not high enough to reach lethal concentration for the bacteria in some place in the body that the bacteria were using as a hideout, with poor blood circulation (e.g. sometimes tooth or bone). Then the surviving bacteria descended from those exposed to sublethal dose _may_ have more resistance.
There's a problem, though, with existing stories of how to discourage the growth of bacterial resistance to antibiotics. The stories tend to concentrate on human antibiotic prescriptions, while they often ignore the role of the enormous use of antibiotics for non-human animals, especially in agriculture. Human physicians sometimes forget the veterinary role in causation. Some of them are so ideologically 'taken' with the message 'be restrained in your prescriptions' that I have seen a patient who really needed antibiotic actually refused it on environmental grounds. She got sicker and sicker until another physician acted at last with some common sense, and then (thankfully) the effect of the medication was as dramatic as in the early accounts of antibiotics from the mid-20th c. when their use first spread.
-wb-
The other solution is to get off carbohydrates and eat a lot more fat. Humans are designed to burn fat for fuel. Bacteria cannot burn fat because they don't have mitochondria. Humans only need a small amount of sugar each day, about 7-12 grams for the brain per hour. The rest of our body can happily burn fat without negative consequence.
So if you limit the amount of carb intake in your diet and run yourself primarily on fats, then guess what? Bacteria have nothing to eat and they can't get a foothold. Even the so-called, "Flesh Eating Bacteria" is like this; the damage it causes is the result of destructive toxins it produces as a by-product of its life cycle, but it still needs to eat sugars. If there are no sugars for it to eat, it's sunk.
Most of the big diseases of civilization are the result of insulin roller-coastering. We've been duped. The studies villainizing fat are based on the worst kind of science and general social momentum.
Switching to a low-carb diet can be difficult if you've been addicted to carbs your whole life. Kind of like how getting off any drug hurts for a while. But the pay-off is huge.
Read "Life Without Bread". A real eye-opener.
Sitting here stydying biochem. Now I am not a doctor so you should not take this as medical advice.
From Biochemistry 5th edition by Richard Harvey and Denise Ferrier Chapter 28 Vitamins section IX Biotin.
"However, the addition of raw egg white to the diet as a source of proteins induces symptoms of biotin deficiency, namely, dermatitis, glossitis, loss of appetite, and nausea. Raw egg white contains a glycoprotein, avidin, which tightly binds biotin and prevents its absorption from the intestine."
I don't remember the source, it's been a while, but I read an online newspaper article about how prevalent NDM-1 is in India. This was hinted at in the article: people coming from India to Europe, bringing that with them. Basically, researchers have found gut flora with the NDM-1 gene in it. Which might actually be good for not killing off your intestinal flora with antibiotics (which I personally did and was f'd for years until I took probiotics). But more importantly, they've found strains of polio and all sorts of other nasty diseases that are mostly nonexistent nowadays (or at least not causing mass epidemics anymore) with the NDM-1 gene. Ie. there already are (or will be soon) strains of every nasty disease that can kill millions of people, all resistant to every antibiotic currently known to man, floating around in the Delhi sewers. I'd like to recommend everyone buy Maitake mushroom pills or grow them yourself. They're immune system boosters. For a couple years now, I've nipped in the bud about 95% of all sicknesses I've got, be it the flu or a cold, by just taking a few of these pills as soon as I feel the symptoms coming on. Fever, nausea, sore throat? Not a problem if I take these early on. They don't work as well if you're already well into the sickness.
Naturally, every progressive treats government power like violence
flag down - unnecessary use of simile.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Virtually *everything* we eat has traces of penicillin in it.
That's an exaggeration. I'd be willing to believe that everything we eat has traces of penicillum fungus on it -- almost -- but not all penicillum produces penicillin. To get penicillin in quantities that have meaningful antibiotic effects requires special environmental conditions -- hence why the people who cultivated it were awarded the Nobel prize.
Breakfast served all day!
"Tops, tops, 2-3 times a week... Unless it's the holidays" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEyVvM4sTUc
Perhaps it's a different medical culture here, or a different culture in general - in Nordic countries we generally try to go for consensus on important issues as a wide cultural preference whenever possible.
Here in the US, we generally try to go for consensus on important issues as a wide cultural preference as well. Except, then we do the exact opposite of whatever said consensus might be.
No. Cows fed antibiotics grow faster, for reasons that aren't fully understood. That is the main reason they are used.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
Do you drink milk?
If you aren't part of the solution, then there is good money to be made prolonging the problem
And no mention whatsoever of Norway's successful program... http://www.reporternews.com/news/2010/jan/01/norway-cuts-antibiotics-successfully-battles/
http://www.buylightfixtures.com/germicidal-light-bulbs-1.aspx
These kill germs directly. They work.
More likely is these bugs are being spread on purpose by CDC and WHO in a classified problem, reaction, solution game board for population reduction.
Since we no longer have oversight of what our governments are doing, you can't just say this isn't possible. Another problem is one trust vs history of these organizations and vaccines. They have miserable failure as their best track record! (man this time I ain't talking about banksters)
I heard from a bird in the grapevine, Oil Of Oregano kills viruses she chirps a song, Colloidal silver works also. There are many others, nearly all the good ones are under attack
The US Constitution is so important. Without it, we go from trusted rule of law to untrusted lawless chaos. Pick any topic, it's going to hell.
So logically, this means the US Constitution must be restored, to restore the rule of law and trust. Pick any topic, it will be fixed.
That should be the goal #1. Not global anything. If it has the word GLOBAL in it, it's a BAD idea which leads to enslavement and debt.
A) It isn't indiscriminate
B) it's far less then an actual dose
C) there is no evidence it has cause any mutation
D) misuse of antibiotic is the primary cause for mutation.
I get it, it seems like that much given to cattle would impact it. But when you find out how little it is on a real metric, weight of the cow, and the 90% of the into amount given to the cow is pissed right back out, you will realize that it's really not an impact on anything regrading mutations.
The remain 10% is use to reduce the amount of bacteria in the gut so the cow absorbed a high percentage of the food. so it's used up.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
No. no antibiotic is in the final product. It's been pissed out or used up.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Every year the same thing. A new winter approaches, a new set of scaremongering to increase sales of vaccines and newspapers. Lets face it: any researching biologist can create conditions in which a common infectious virus or bacteria can mutate to make it a "super-bug". It is a very easy way to get your name into the biological text books, a very easy thing to be afraid of and a very easy thing to be taken out of all proportion.
Anti-bacterial soaps have also been almost exclusively supplemented with alcohol based hand washes in the UK hospitals too. Then again, most if not all UK hospitals are breeding grounds for MRSA thanks to terrible (and I mean terrible) facility cleaning. I've visited the A&E department several times with blood-spattered walls, phlegm covered floors and doctors so incompetent they cant even turn the equipment on (true personal experience).
Take a step back and look at some figures: the last "outbreak" of the H1N1 virus in the UK was so overblown in the statistics so the UK government could justify paying so much for vaccinations. They actually stopped testing for it the specific virus and ended up automatically branding all cold / flu like cases during the outbreak period as H1N1! Without testing! While knowing that these statistics are completely unreliable, how can people look at these numbers and logically conclude that we have anything greater to fear than the regular flu?
Scaremongering needs to stop. I specifically said nothing last time in an effort to stay out of it, but now its just getting silly.
Additionally: I saw here a few mentions about how doctors will prescribe and send you on their way. In the UK if a GP does not process their average patients visit within 4.5 minutes then they actually get fined. I have been in for a consulted and diagnosed in less than 45 seconds once, I actually timed it. We bring this system onto ourselves too. We complain "there are never enough doctors and I have to wait days to see one!" so the system changes to process more people and we complain "I was never consulted properly I need to be seen for longer and discuss things!" so the system changes again and we complain "now I have to wait too long again!". Doctors do not grow on trees, and the well educated UK doctors all go to Australia, Canada or the USA when they are done with their rotations. Well, at least half of them do, or so I am told by my friend who is a staffing manager in the NHS PCT (primary care trust) where I live.
We all also like to complain about how its our own fault that these drug resistant bugs exist but here is a fact: anyone here who is educated in this subject would not take too many antibiotics knowing they could be ineffective, but lets face it; the majority of the world does not post on Slashdot. People by and large are ill educated about illness and don't care anyway, meaning whatever educational approaches are taken will fall on deaf or stupid ears. The majority of people just want what is best for them, and why not? That's just human nature. A leopard never changes his spots the same way an idiot refuses to even try to understand the difference between viral and bacterial infections. Why would doctors bother to deal with these people in any other way? Would you? I know I wouldn't. After spending 8 to 10 hours a day prodding boils, checking prostates and explaining to fat people why they have diabetes, all the time worrying that an argument with a patient could force me over my time quota and get my practise fined, I would just be happy to sign anything just to get home.
One last little thought: state run systems have the power to forcibly misdiagnose and allow for no alternative treatment or medical intervention into a patients complaints. Having a system where doctors have power over a patients decision is terrible. I would rather see resources wasted on hypochondriacs than see a single person die from a misdiagnosis of a patient that was then left with no alternative recourse for treatment or medical aid. We live in a world whe
Another way to look at this is that antibiotics are a short-term imbalance on a nature's long-term balance. In the short time (since the 1930s) that antibiotics have existed, we have managed to push back against bacteria. In the long term, organisms develop defenses against pathogens, and the pathogens develop ways around the defenses. We can expect that nature, with its huge numerical advantage (many microbes vs very few antibiotics), will eventually find evolutionary pathways around our defenses.
Vasquez: [after barely surviving the Alien surprise attack] Okay. We have several canisters of CM-20. I say we go back in there and nerve gas the whole fuckin' nest.
Hicks: It's worth the try, but we don't know if that's gonna affect them.
Hudson: Let's just bug out and call it even, mat! What are we even talking about this for?
Ripley: I say we take off and nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
Hudson: Fuckin' A!
Burke: Hold on a second. This installation has a substantial dollar value attached to it.
Ripley: They can *bill* me.
You are willfully ignorant. None of the common drug resistant bacteria originate in the third world. Most are drug resistant strains of bacteria that everyone carries every day. Antibiotics are expensive and in short supply in most of the third world, so it would be difficult for drug resistant strains of 3rd world bacteria to evolve to threaten Europe. You can't blame this one on the non-arians.
If you aren't part of the solution, then there is good money to be made prolonging the problem
As we dump more crap (literally) and industrial waste into sewage streams, the result bacteria actively engage in the unspeakable and geneswap themselves to supremacy, the world has decided that greenwashing putting sewage onto farm lands is great idea.
Yes, we do this in USA and they've done it for longer time in europe.
Now, we find MRSA, multi-drug resistance for EColi and more infectious diseases that hospitals are ding'd with from medicare underpayments for readmissions and HAI are all on the rise.
We as a species are idiots - we will create the plague that will ultimately destroy us.
"Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it" --some famous quote from somone
Every adaptation to antibiotics makes the bacteria that much weaker and less efficient in general. Maybe if we can come up with enough of them our bodies will be so much better able to fight them off naturally that it won't be a worry anymore.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
I think it's time to seriously consider Phage therapy, which has been proven reliable and used for years already. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phage_therapy
I have recently been studying permaculture and one thing I have learned is how interconnected everything is in nature. Even (and especially) if antibiotics work perfectly they still make us more open to infection because of biodiversity concerns. The same occurs with insecticide use in fields, for example-- insecticides are the surest way to ensure that pests don't get predators.
There are a number of pathogens which most of us carry (Candida albans for example, which is a yeast responsible not only for feminine yeast infections but also for more serious digestive yeast infections which can affect either sex) which cause many more problems in people who have had antibiotics within the previous year than those who have not, and the reason is the pathogen is a yeast which has to compete with bacteria..... you kill the bacteria and guess what happens?
Antibiotics have no doubt saved many lives, but we are all better off (individually and collectively) if they are saved for where they are really life-saving and as a last resort.
It's not just the numerical advantage. It's the biodiversity issues as well, and how we end up killing the very things that protect us in the same process.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
There are some antibiotics/antibacterials that are quite effective, but happen to be toxic if ingested. Plenty of these are fine if they are used in soaps because they stay on the right side of your skin. In many cases they use mechanisms that there is no resistance to.
After all, soap on its own is pretty good at killing bacteria, but you can't use it intravenously. The trick is finding things toxic to bacteria but not to the human consuming them.
I think the real issues with antibiotic resistance are the use in the livestock industry as growth promotors, a decline in hand hygiene in hospitals due to overconfidence in our ability to treat infections and a lack of education of those receiving drugs about the importance of taking a full course at full strength.
A) It isn't indiscriminate
Yes it is. Antibiotics are fed to healthy livestock as a preventative measure.
B) it's far less then an actual dose
Which is far worse. The proper way to use antibiotics is to use a large dose to kill all bacteria before any have a chance to adapt.
C) there is no evidence it has cause any mutation
CBC Marketplace did a study of antibiotic resistant bacteria in chicken. Two thirds of 100 samples were contaminated by bacteria, all of which were resistant to at least one antibiotic. Most were resistant to at least five.
D) misuse of antibiotic is the primary cause for mutation.
And this is a gross misuse of antibiotics.
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I already had a patient, who was Mexican, with resistant Klebsiella with a bad knee infection.
Had to amputate his leg, as it was killing him. He's doing better now.
I have a remote, but not too distant fear, of having to practice medicine, specifically surgery, without the benefit of antibiotics. That would probably mean a near end to most elective surgery and huge decrease in average life scan. No more total joint replacements, vein bypasses, organ transplants, etc.
..........FULL STOP.
That's partly the point. You can get trace quantities of penicillin's eating just about everything. Those are not nearly high enough to have meaningful antibiotic effects and so there is no natural selection at work in the bacteria. (Interestingly I am allergic to *some* medical penicillins but have no trouble with others-- penicillin G gives me hives, amoxycillin does not, and I can eat blue cheeses without problems.)
The issue is that *consumption* of trace quantities of antibiotics is not the issue. The problem is the simple fact that we are feeding them to the animals in these doses.
Interestingly in ancient Egypt, moldy bread was used as a topical antibiotic, which strikes me as quite interesting. Similarly it looks like the Chinese used various common molds to treat skin infections as well.
The reason, however, that penicillin antibiotics even work at all today, as you point out is that sufficient quantities to provide antibiotic effects does not commonly occur in nature.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Yes, I am aware of the fact that biotin deficiency is connected to raw egg consumption. However, as I understand it, it is commonly found only in those who regularly eat raw eggs in sufficient doses. Having a dessert once a year that's basically raw egg yolks and powdered sugar spooned onto cookies is pretty harmless nutritionally. Same with mousse containing small amounts of raw eggs, or occasional homemade egg not. Unless you eat them all the time, that is.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Doctors know how to prevent MRSA infections, is this any different?
Those are seriously useful tips. of course, i will do some reading first before indiscrimately applying them, but you are probably correct. heat, salt, alcohol, our own immune system: pretty good stuff, not easy for bacteria to evolve defenses against. like cedar oil against insects, the cedar tree has had strong motivation for millions of years to keep bugs away, and it works.
You hear about the person who didn't rely on anecdotal evidence to support his belief system?
solved
One study showed that 94% of chickens sold retail as meat in the Netherlands had ESBL (extended spectrum Beta-Lactmase) "superbug" bacterial strains. These have been linked to ESBL infections that have been isolated in cases recently across Europe. The use of antibiotics in animals is mostly for weight gain as opposed to treating infections and is therefore often at a lower dose - which is the perfect conditions to develop resistance in bacteria.
1.
I have used sterilized kitchen knives to lance the infection
Remind me never to eat at your house ;), and
2.
because it's easier than teaching people to soak infected fingers in hot salt water
I think you typoed "more profitable". Simple mistake to make, the keys are right next to each other.