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Multidrug Resistance Gene Released By Chinese Wastewater Treatment Plants
MTorrice writes "In recent years, increasing numbers of patients worldwide have contracted severe bacterial infections that are untreatable by most available antibiotics. Some of the gravest of these infections are caused by bacteria carrying genes that confer resistance to a broad class of antibiotics called beta-lactams, many of which are treatments of last resort. Now a research team reports that some wastewater treatment plants in China discharge one of these potent resistance genes into the environment. Environmental and public health experts worry that this discharge could promote the spread of resistance."
yeah, maybe.
Antibacterial soaps are a frankenstein. Invented as something to cure a sppoky "risk" (like "bacteria") and sold, sold, sold. Multivitamins, ADHD drugs, billions of dollars of bullshit are being sold to consumers, harnessing innate risk aversion and evolved nurture to sell snake oil. India has already used so many antibacterial products that its hospitals are a paradise for resistant staph bacteria. Go upstream from the Chinese water treatment plants, and you'll find consumers who think they are doing the right thing and protecting their families.
Gently reply
damn Gweilo, who do they think they are, the moderators between earth and heaven?
they take their pills for two days and then go back to sucking cocks for crack but it's more politically correct to blame the evil chinese than the poor ol' american nignog.
So, I have seen my gf, parents and even myself being given by doctors high spectrum antibiotics for trivial sickness; then the disgrace of the cattle and farming industry using preemptively antibiotics just in case, for being able to maintain animals in unthinkable environments and for fattening animal and not stopping at anything, even when it is already widespread knowledge antibiotics will stop working in less than ten years time. And know it is Chinas fault???? Talking about the elephant in the room...
To Whom It May Concern (other than myself):
Hi. I have been a huge fan of cereals of all kinds for my whole life. Sometimes I eat it for all three meals of the day, or live on it exclusively for weeks, or put it in my underpants to keep me feeling fresh (and also as an emergency back-up snack). I cereasly love it.
I am especially fond of a lot of your cereals like Boo Berry and Trix and Chex and Lucky Charms and Cookie Crisp. My absolute favorite is Fruity Pebbles though, which I believe is a Post cereal. Maybe you guys should make something that tastes like Fruity Pebbles except manages not to have Fred Flintstone's ugly mug all over the box. Yabba Dabba Eww. Anyway, my point is that I like a lot of your cereals and so I am personally concerned with their condition. And, quite frankly, lately I've been a bit worried.
Let's start with my favorite cereal of yours - Boo Berry. I love Boo Berry... at least I think I do... actually, I know it used to be my favorite cereal but I haven't had any in years so I've kind of forgotten what it tastes like - because it's not in any stores! No stores in my area carry it. I checked on your website and apparently you still make it; you even offer it for sale. Unfortunately I can't justify buying it for the $6.74 for a twelve ounce box price. You do offer buying it in a case instead of a four pack, which would drop the price to $4.71 a box, but that is still unreasonable and would also require me to spend an entire week's pay on a large shipment of haunted cereal. My girlfriend would kill me (if I didn't overdose on blue food coloring first).
I think I have a solution to this dilemma. I know you can't force any businesses to carry your cereals and I know that you can't afford to sell them direct for less than $4.71 and still have money left over to pay for upkeep on Count Chocula's castle, hiring someone to build 400 mind-numbing advertisements disguised as crappy kids games for youruleschool.com, and keep your CEOs rolling in golden Kix. So here's what you should do - open up your own stores all across the country. You've already got one in Mall-of-America, now put one in every mall in America. Even if you don't sell much cereal (and you'd sell a lot, trust me) it would be great advertising. You can sell t-shirts with nifty slogans like "Frosted Wheaties: When You're Too Damn Lazy To Put Sugar On Your Own Wheaties!" or "Honey Nut Chex: It Rhymes With 'Funny Butt Sex' For A Reason!" and other stuff which is even more great advertising plus it makes money up front. I can see it now, picture a young child in the mall with its mother...
YOUNG CHILD: Mommy! Mommy! Look at all the pretty colored cereal!
MOTHER: Oh Honey, you know cereals like that are just a result of the global dentist/cereal/porn conspiracy, we've been through this a million times...
YOUNG CHILD: Awww...
MAN IN TRIX RABBIT SUIT comes out of the store.
MAN IN TRIX RABBIT SUIT: You know Ms. Averagemother, all of our cereals are fortified with titanium plating and deflector shi... er, essential vitamins and minerals; and they are a part of this complete breakfast.
MAN IN TRIX RABBIT SUIT whips out a complete breakfast on a tray.
MOTHER: Well... I guess a few minutes couldn't hurt...
YOUNG CHILD: Gee, thanks mom!
YOUNG CHILD runs in followed slowly by MOTHER. Group of scantily clad dentists appears and drags MOTHER into back room. YOUNG CHILD transforms into a cartoon and spends eternity trying to steal Lucky's Charms and torturing the Trix Rabbit by hogging the cereal.
Now, on to my next suggestion. You need to do something about Cheerios. Really, they're awful. Yes they are good for my heart, but this is overshadowed by the fact that they taste like my butt.
On the other hand, a cereal that already tastes great is Lucky Charms. I would like you to address some concerns I have about the marshmallows, though. I remember that when I was a lad, there were only five different marshmallows in Lucky Charms: pink hearts, yellow moons, orange
New Law Needed!!
If the Doctor doesn't wash his hands every time he visits you for treatment, then the Doctor must complete the treatment and cannot charge you for it.
This would cure MRSA REALLY quick!!
Not good! So basically, gene NDM-1 jumps from bacteria carrying the gene to living bacteria that doesn't. I don't know exactly how this happens, but apparently this is a natural form of gene therapy. I suspect this finding in the Chinese waste water plant is the tip of the iceberg. They seem to be treating waste at the most basic level by using lots of chlorine prior to discharging the treated waste. Nothing abnormal about that. I'm willing to bet that waste water treatment plants in every nation have this exact same issue! Hardy little buggers.
Life is not for the lazy.
Maybe my knowledge of biology is a bit lacking, but doesn't a gene need an organism? It sounds like they are talking about drug resistant bacteria, which have a traits of their DNA.
It's just as annoy as cop shows where look for DNA samples. You're not sampling the DNA with your cotton swab, you're attempting to capture cells, from which you can extract the DNA.
Then again, we're talking about two of the same groups (news media and fictional cop shows) where they'd both easily say "hack the mainframe". Ahh, the mainframe. The mysterious device I can access from a Nintendo Gameboy in the middle of the Atlantic ocean, using more more than my good looks, the Gameboy, a clothes pin, and some chewing gum.
Ya, tell me about those evil genes floating around by themselves, in their attempt to take over the world.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
No I am not joking. Given China's history are abusing and murdering it's own citizens, this is a likely suspect. If this is true, it is not only insane. it should be criminal. I may be wrong, if so, someone tell me why they would release this in a nations water supply for any other reason. It is sad we say we live in a age of military/social insanity where atrocities are committed against people in the name of whatever is convenient at the time to blame. It is a shame such a small group of people are so capable of harming so many people. But group mentality has always been that way. A few people can terrorize a large crowd. sigh...........
I'm old, not dead. Well that's my 2 cents worth, your mileage may vary. I say what I think, not what you want to hear.
Yes please, I'll take a large helping.
I have cold n cough... So do 5 of my friends.. Whom should I blame?
Beta lactam resistance is common. That's the class of antibiotics which includes penicillin; not an antibiotic of last resort by any means. (Resistance is so common that if you're prescribed a beta lactam antibiotic nowadays, it'll probably be compounded with a beta lactamase inhibitor) Since beta lactam resistance is so common, the gene will no doubt be common in the waste stream, not just in China but everywhere.
like how a white man would say.
Now there is money to be made in multi-drug resistant jeans!
not futile?
What could possibly go wrong!
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Or gay people or Mexicans or atheists...
As long as you don't finger the actual cause: agricultural antibiotics abuse.
Beta lactam resistance is common. That's the class of antibiotics which includes penicillin; not an antibiotic of last resort by any means.
It's also the category which includes carbapenems like Imipenem and Meropenem which are last resort drugs. In particular, the production of metallo-beta-lactamases like NDM-1 is a key adaptation to resist them, and the article highlights the risk specifically to neutralizing carbapenems as the main cause of concern.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Not good! So basically, gene NDM-1 jumps from bacteria carrying the gene to living bacteria that doesn't. I don't know exactly how this happens, but apparently this is a natural form of gene therapy.
Plasmid transfer.
I suspect this finding in the Chinese waste water plant is the tip of the iceberg. They seem to be treating waste at the most basic level by using lots of chlorine prior to discharging the treated waste. Nothing abnormal about that. I'm willing to bet that waste water treatment plants in every nation have this exact same issue! Hardy little buggers.
It may be worse than that. I found this last night while doing some reading related to the triclosan article but hesitated to bring it up, but it seems that chlorination itself may provide selection pressure that favors bacteria resistant to certain beta-lactam antibiotics..
We don't actually know the exact mechanism by which chlorine kills or damages bacteria, but we do know that increased permeability of the cell membrane enhances its lethality (but is not mechanism of lethality in and of itself). Beta-lactam drugs work by monkeywrenching the process of building the peptidoglycan layer of bacterial cell walls, so it may be that some forms of resistance to cell wall wrecking drugs also help resist chlorination, which would make chlorination in turn select for that trait.
At this point, I'm in pure speculation territory, though. I am not a molecular biologist.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
The only way to fight evolution is to stay one step ahead, it's only natural for resistance to happen. There will always be the next bad thing, but with good ol fashioned human ingenuity we can fight.
Well we could also regress and start doing it like we did in the dark ages with the catch 22 drowning test.
says the Monsanto PR rep.
It's nice to see that China is finally releasing dissidents.
www.gaiageek.com
Just because they found it 1 place that they looked, doesn't mean its not NOT in other places too.
Uneducated consumers + modern denial of causality + business interests = fail. You have ignorant parents who buy antibacterial everything because its "for the children" and because after all, they need to protect theirs, and it probably wont turn into MRSA _for them_, so shouldn't they do everything they can,etc. etc. Ditto with food - people buying shit at Walmart because they need to save money, meanwhile their neighbors lose their jobs and their kids end up playing with cadmium laced toys, but hey, they need to save 3 dollars on that gizmo.... Add the business interests capitalizing on this ignorance and philosophical gap (A !is !A) and you end up with the shitstorm we're in.
Moral: know what you're buying, know why you're buying it.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
the rampant misuse of antibiotics in the USA is far worse. Just ask any hospital's chief pathologist. They will most likely (every micro lab I have worked in did it) tracked the increase in resistance found naturally thanks to us giving everyone with a snotty nose antibiotics.
Seriously? That's like saying we've made HIV able to transmit to anything and survive via water and there's a TEENY TEENY chance it will infect the world's population of wildlife in less than a week.
Someone should be isolating bacteriaphages from this source and testing them on MRSA and similar resistant bacteria.
More info
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phage_therapy
Definitely a Borg joke in there somewhere.
Never play chicken with a passive aggressive.
always refuse'ed to eat at chinky retraunts because she said they were dirty. We always thoght shewas just rbean acsist. Nope.
CHINKS ARE DIRTY BASTIRD"S