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Totally Drug-Resistant TB Emerges In India
ananyo writes "Physicians in India have identified a form of incurable tuberculosis there, raising further concerns over increasing drug resistance to the disease (abstract). Although reports call this latest form a 'new entity,' researchers suggest that it is instead another development in a long-standing problem. The discovery makes India the third country in which a completely drug-resistant form of the disease has emerged, following cases documented in Italy in 2007 and Iran in 2009."
We just haven't found a drug to fight it. And before people get on the anti-antibiotics bandwagon, if we didn't use antibiotics, then the simplest infection would be "Totally Drug-Resistant".
Now if you want to speak of the "overuse" or preventative use of antibiotics, then go ahead.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
And yet the food industry and the pharmaceutical industry would have us believe that the overuse of antibiotics is harmless ...cough.
Silence is a state of mime.
The only silver lining is that it's not even more deadly. At least we can learn about the effectiveness of quarantine methods in the modern era before something even more deadly shows up. Also each evolution that allows a bacteria to become resistant to a drug weakens the bacteria in all other cases.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
Isn't the real story that it's in three countries, and that they are geographically disparate?
Or... does the disease only affect countries that start with the letter I?
"No, I'm, I'm simply saying that life, uh... finds a way. "
The bitter lessons of a veteran coder: http://bitterprogrammer.blogspot.com
I was wondering why "Bob" kept coughing.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I could ramble aimlessly about this general topic for a while, but instead to farm karma more efficiently I think I'll make an obscure, off topic point that I think is interesting by analogy: this directing of evolution also occurs at an environmental scale. Life may find ways to survive in the presence of all the chemicals we dump into the ecosystem, but it will be more vulnerable to other stressors as a result, including those through which it would normally survive. In combination with the on-going loss of diversity caused by more direct damage to the environment, life as we know it is pretty cornered.
It's a little as if we're extremely incompetent first-year med students trying to eliminate a patient's symptoms (i.e. the planet's inherent imperfection for supporting modern life) and we're on the verge of unintentionally killing off the infection that's actually responsible. (Admittedly, this is a lousy analogy, but it's important to realise that it's happening.)
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Can you point to a Young Earth Creationist who doesn't think natural selection can account for drug resistance? Because I haven't come across one. Let alone the Old Earthers or more generic Intelligent Design folk.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
Also each evolution that allows a bacteria to become resistant to a drug weakens the bacteria in all other cases.
I had not understood this to be true. I keep hearing that strains of bacteria become resistant to all antibiotics. not just a queue of 3, then the next strain is resistant to a 4th antibiotic, but no longer resistant to the first. Evolution does seem to favor specialization, but traits are only lost if they hinder. I don't know exactly what the mechanism of resistance is, but i don't know that each kind of antibiotic requires some new organ to exist resulting in lumpy slow bacteria.
Sorry, but your eugenics program will have to wait for another day. Drug-resistant TB is everywhere.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
For those interested in exactly how prevalent this sort of thing is, be aware that drug resistant TB is in almost every country in the world; it's just really bad in those particular three countries. This journal article from 2006 has maps showing the incidence rates per country.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
It might be popular if it stood a chance of working...
Wikipedia quote:
One third of the world's population is thought to be infected with M. tuberculosis,[3][4] and new infections occur at a rate of about one per second.[3] In 2007 there were an estimated 13.7 million chronic active cases,[5] and in 2010 8.8 million new cases, and 1.45 million deaths, mostly in developing countries.[6] The absolute number of tuberculosis cases has been decreasing since 2006 and new cases since 2002.[6] In addition, more people in the developing world contract tuberculosis because their immune systems are more likely to be compromised due to higher rates of AIDS.[7] The distribution of tuberculosis is not uniform across the globe; about 80% of the population in many Asian and African countries test positive in tuberculin tests, while only 5–10% of the U.S. population test positive.[1]
It sounds like many Asian and African countries need the opposite (a place for all the healthy people to go).
We've had drug resistant TB in the UK. That includes one case in Basingstoke, where a family friend works as a nurse. The patient is (or was, this was two years ago) an intravenous drug user.
It's the energetic cost. Think of climbing Everest, an electric heater and generator+fuel might be very useful, but the weight you have to lug around is really prohibitive to doing it, so you only take what's necessary to survive up there.
TB can be vaccinated against.
in india antibiotics are used as if it was water
Yeah, I've heard about this. In particular, about them being given out like M&Ms, even for viral infections where the doctors knew damn well that they'd do nothing useful, but wanted to pander to the patients. That's not even the OP's "overuse", it's blatant and irresponsible misuse that was obviously going to cause major grief at some point- well, here we are.
I've heard it said that such people had no other option, but since their only "option" didn't work, the doctors would have been more responsible giving them placebo sugar pills. Wouldn't have helped those particular patients any more, but it would have caused less harm to the same demographic of poor people in general that this TB is now most likely to hit.
At any rate, if it hadn't already been in the headline, I'd have guessed (rightly) that it had started in India- this isn't remotely surprising.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
@Boregardless: How about you stop your racist tripe and take a dose of facts:
The origin of MSRA has been primarily traced from Europe, and thats where today there are maximum infections (and deaths).
Read:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methicillin-resistant_Staphylococcus_aureus#US_and_UK
Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) primarily originated from UK. MRSA was responsible for 94,360 serious infections and associated with 18,650 hospital stay-related deaths in the United States in 2005. MRSA is thought to have caused 1,652 deaths in 2006 in UK up from 51 in 1993. Worldwide, an estimated 2 billion people carry some form of S. aureus; of these, up to 53 million (2.7% of carriers) are thought to carry MRSA.[59] In the United States, 95 million carry S. aureus in their noses; of these, 2.5 million (2.6% of carriers) carry MRSA. As a matter of fact # of hospital aquired infections (that includes MRSA) in Europe ranges from 4% to 10% of all hospital admissions.
I can't work out whether this is meant to be a joke or not, or whether the people who modded it up as "Funny" misinterpreted it as a joke, or whether they thought it wasn't a joke, but modded it up as "Funny" anyway to show how laughable they thought it was.... :-/
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Tuberculin tests are just that, they test for the antibody. So even people who are no longer infected, or were vaccinated will test positive.
And, to make things even worse, the standard from what I've seen among the Indians I have worked with is to take the antibiotics until starting to feel better, then stop taking them. This results in recurrent infections of resistant bacteria. I've also observed this a lot with people from the Caribbean.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
You're trying to be funny here, but as the linked nature article says, "Tuberculosis trails behind only HIV as the world’s leading cause of death from infectious disease."-- and unlike HIV, it has been circulating since antiquity. There's a fair bit of speculation (though difficult to prove) that evolutionary pressure from TB has contributed to some types of autoimmune disease susceptibility.
Stop feeling so superior (and stop being so condescending to others).
Developed countries abuse antibiotics by feeding them to animals for better yields and by doctors kowtowing to worried patients with viral infections.
There are "uneducated idiots" (to use your phrase) everywhere.
As another poster pointed out, drug-resistant TB is everywhere. http://jid.oxfordjournals.org/content/194/4/479.full.pdf
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
I'm not racist.
I quite admire the Indian's ability to survive in the face of their societal and economic circumstances where the challenges are huge on multiple levels.
The info I cited came from WHO report data which was in the UK Telegraph, if I remember the source correctly, and it was published about 2 weeks ago.
It was also mentioned on NPR that one of the patients with the drug-immune TB in India actually checked themselves out of the hospital and they can't find them.
Here's to you our new "Patient Zero"
Insurance is the very definition of getting someone else to pay for you.
I'm not sure you understand how insurance works. Whether or not insurance means getting someone else to pay for you depends entirely on how much you've paid into the system, and how much insurance payout you (successfully) claim.
In a very simple example, if I've paid $150/mo for five years and only make one claim of $500, of which only $200 is over my deductible, the insurance company is ahead by $8,800.
In the specific context of TB vaccinations, I rather doubt that the cost of a child's vaccination will exceed the revenue brought in by the parents' insurance payments for that month.
Cheers,
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