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Antibiotic-Resistant E Coli Reaches The US For The First Time (reuters.com)
New submitter maharvey writes: A woman in Pennsylvania has contracted a strain of E Coli that is unaffected by all known legal antibiotics, including the antibiotics of last resort. We have had bacteria that were resistant, but this is the first bacteria that is completely immune. Such bacteria were known in China, but since the woman has not traveled recently it means she contracted it in the wild in the USA. This is a major step toward the terrifying post-antibiotic world.
they've come home to roost.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
I'm not a doctor, and this isn't medical advice of course, but in the past I've heard people suggest that dipping one's penis and scrotum in vodka after a sexual encounter can supposedly help avoid contracting STDs. I assume this would work because of the alcohol content of the vodka? Could something similar be done to eliminate this strain of E. Coli?
Biodiversity is a good thing, but we're destroying it. We need to allow nature to create new antibiotics and use those as needed.
Also, there are some fucking absurd abuses of antibiotics. Doctors are way too quick to wrote prescriptions when they aren't necessary. We need to stop prescribing antibiotics when they aren't necessary for infections that will be stopped by the body's immune system or as preventive measures.
Furthermore, we shouldn't be wasting antibiotics on animals, especially for cattle. I'm sorry that one of the animals in your herd is sick. There's no fucking reason to put antibiotics in the feed of all of your cattle. That's fucking ridiculous. Don't use antibiotics on cattle.
This is a fucking big deal. People who misuse antibiotics should lose their license to practice medicine. I'd also support prison time for it.
protect themselves from the superbug and from other bacteria resistant to antibiotics by thoroughly washing their hands, washing fruits and vegetables thoroughly and preparing foods appropriately.
what about not using antibiotics on living animals? They serve as a feeding ground for antibiotics. The price would be that you have to pay more for products that include flesh, because you would have to isolate the animals better, in order to stop spreading illnesses.
Total Failure of Government and Society and not a good sign for the future of the human race. I personally have been well aware of the risks of Antibiotic-Resistant for over 20 years. This was the text book example of natural selection in my High School Biology class.
Instead of listening to the scientists and public health officals on the risks, we have let the greed and money in big ag run make our laws. We let them dump antibiotics in our livestock food in so we could have cheap meat and now the chickens are coming home to roost.
Welcome back to the pre-antibiotic era where a cut can be deadly and hospitals can kill you. Nice job humanity!
What about the illegal antibiotics?
1) don't let the Mexicans that pick your lettuce take a shit in the patch.
2) don't fuck butts without a jimmy
Antibiotics may be useless but can't we research a way to alter a bacteriophage to hunt out and destroy these superbugs. I mean we can alter the immune system to attack cancer cells. Technology may slow down or replace the need for antibiotics.
All you Products companies Just Keep on marketing your Anti Bacterial Products because we all know your Profits are more important then Humanity
Bacteriophages have already been helpful with many cases of bacterial infection, they would probably already be in more widespread use (outside of the former USSR) if big pharma wouldn't insist on only selling patented stuff for the better of profits.
This isn't well reported in the media, and that Reuters link crashes my Fedora system hard, but what about that phage therapy supposedly commercialized in Georgia? I have no idea if it works. There are so many medical scams these days, that I wonder if there even is a "doctor" who isn't a crook, scam artist, charlatan, or quack. (The whole U.S. healthcare system for sure...)
If it weren't for drug and livestock regulations in the US, we could have accelerated this by several years or maybe even a decade. I, for one, am eager to see what happens when our ProBusiness overlords succeed in dismantling all of the impediments to efficient business practices and maximum short term profit - like the FDA, USDA, CDC, FCC, EPA, etc.
Silver. (Google 'silver colloid') Still in use today to sterilize touchable surfaces in hospitals. Sorry, it can't be patented so no big corporation will be interested. The medical establishment will only steer you to patented products, so be wary of their advice. You can even make your own. Far more adaptable than other antibiotics. Drink it; inhale it; drop it in your eyes; lavish it on skin burns; spray it on icky surfaces you have to touch... Some minor precautions advised (don't drink large quantities over a long period of time).
...omphaloskepsis often...
More proof of our trade imbalance with China.
Before you wanna place blames, ask yourself --- if you are a farmer and you only make money selling "LIVING" livestock, would you do everything you can to keep your animal alive - until the second before they got inside slaughterhouse?
Farmers don't get paid for sick/dying/dead animals, that is why they feed those animals crazy amount of whatever antibiotics that they can find
If you guys really want to place blame, blame the government instead
The pharmaceutical companies invested huge amount of $ to develop the antibiotics, only to meet with government regulation that prohibit them to push it to the human medical channels (new antibiotics have to be 'quarantine for x number of years' to have a 'weapon of last resort' against whatever drug resistant bugs that they come across)
This stupid regulation only forces the big pharma to go another route, and push their product into non-human channels - the farm animals, which the FDA doesn't have any jurisdiction on
Now the superbugs come home and bite our ass - what are we going to do?
Ban the use of antibiotic on the farm animals?
That will only create a lucrative black markets for farm-grade antibiotics
For someone who is not a doctor you, how can you make a claim like that? LOL. In the wild. I bet that you don't know the first thing about this person other than what you read in the fly-by media article that you linked to.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phage_therapy is quite effective and has being used in Soviet Union since before WWII. Docs around there routinely prescribe phages and antibiotics together. Funny that no first world country has any ability to employ it, even the wiki says "Phage therapy has many _potential_ applications in human medicine...(italics are mine)". US is going to build up another dependence of Russia, this time on medical services, in addition to rocket engines and manned ISS flights.
Did they try every single antibiotic on this woman? Just because it has mcr-1 and is resistant to colistin doesn't mean it's resistant to everything. A friend of mine got a chest infection that was resistant to a lot of different antibiotics, including zithromax. After trying 4 different antibiotics, the doctor gave him sustained release penicillin, because, why not. 3 days later the couching stopped and he was on the mend.
Total Failure of Government and Society and not a good sign for the future of the human race. I personally have been well aware of the risks of Antibiotic-Resistant for over 20 years. This was the text book example of natural selection in my High School Biology class.
Instead of listening to the scientists and public health officals on the risks, we have let the greed and money in big ag run make our laws. We let them dump antibiotics in our livestock food in so we could have cheap meat and now the chickens are coming home to roost.
Welcome back to the pre-antibiotic era where a cut can be deadly and hospitals can kill you. Nice job humanity!
While what you say may be true, I disagree with your conclusions and your hindsight.
There should be no problem giving massive amounts of antibiotics to livestock. In fact, we should be giving *more*, or at least *more effective* antibiotics to livestock.
The regulatory problem wasn't from giving out too many antibiotics, it was because the regulations are so stiff that it's impossible to create new antibiotics. The fundamental flaw in the system was to make government bureaucrats responsible for risk, while making drug companies responsible for that risk.
This has led to risk-averse government bureaucrats setting the bar so high that it's become impossible to make new drugs.
The Hippocratic oath reads (in part): "above all, do no harm". This was rewritten by the FAA to be: "do no harm at any cost!"
It currently costs upwards of a billion dollars to bring a new prescription drug to market. No company can afford to make a new drug unless it can apply to everyone as a maintenance dose.
Viagra was only developed because it was a noticed side-effect of a high blood pressure medicine.
Suppose we had 25 approved antibiotics, and used them in 5-year increments in a rotating scale. Each year 5 of the 25 antibiotics could be used, and each year one would be rotated out and another added. Each antibiotic would be used for 5 years and then disappear for 20. It would take a very long time under that scheme for diseases to develop immunity.
We can't do that any more, because it's impossible to develop new antibiotics.
There's lots of common-sense ways we could change this, but we don't.
We're killing ourselves from an abundance of caution.
This is a stupid question, but I've always wondered why old (very old, unused for decades) antibacterials can't be resurrected with a restored effectiveness. I liken it to the idea of rotating crops so the field soils aren't totally stripped of nutrients by planting the same crop year after year.
I mean: what does in benefit rather simple organisms to continue to pass along resistance to a spectrum of anti-biotic that their ancestors hadn't been exposed to in decades (and that's how many bacterial generations)? Isn't there a 'carrying capacity' or 'memory limit' to what can be added to their code that has to be slowly deprecated / de-prioritized just for physical space constraints? Asserting they have the Borg-like ability to perfectly add to their defenses without end, sounds a bit too apocalyptic to me.
But I never get laid...
It's not like there was a mass social movement demanding that cows be inundated with antibiotics because they're knee-deep in their own shit on a factory farm. Like climate change, asbestos or the tobacco industry, this is about profit for a handful of people.
Doing so will suppress your immune system. I suggest doing exactly the opposite.
The original publication makes no claims about the strain being resistant to to _all known/legal antibiotics_. Maybe everyone should use some critical thinking and check the soruces or you could read more sane analysis at Ars Technica.
http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/05/everybody-be-cool-a-nightmare-superbug-has-not-heralded-the-apocalypse-yet/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Not life threatening but the quantity of silver required to effectivelky treat such bacterial infection may lead easily to agyria, localized or generalized. On the other hand we may get better avatar porn, so there is a, hehe , silver lining. (and now I'll slap myself silly for the easy joke).
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visit randi.org
Food, Inc., US food industry
When nature's defenses are no longer sufficient, will we then turn to technology to protect us from the inside?
Wouldn't that solve all of our concerns? Little tiny floating micro-robots swimming in your system hunting down predefined organisms. Depending on their effectiveness, this could also help improve recovery times and repeat infections.
Send that though the ecology was resistant to theast resort antibiotic, another antibiotic took care of he infection. Details in this article : http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/863896
There are herbal options for treating this, http://www.amazon.com/Herbal-A...
Why am I not terrified in this post antibiotic world?
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
This is the beginning of the end of the modern era.
It was modern medicine - antibiotics, mainly - which allowed the advances which make modern life possible. Things like space flight, or even high capacity public transit, become untenable when the possibility of fatal bacterial strains being spread in the public: people will shun crowded, filthy public transit for fear of contracting something.
And just forget about manned space flight.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Phages work. They are safe and specifically target the problem bacteria.
In fact phages are so specific in their targeting, that's a challenge to their use. There's no such thing as a "broad spectrum" phage. You have to keep enormous libraries of phages, test the patient and treat them for the exact bacterial infection they have. A phage will eat nothing else and that includes, crucially, the patient.
The former Soviet Union invested heavily into phages and has an institute in the republic of Georgia. They are the world leaders. Go to them and start learning what they know.
Resistance is a virtual non-issue to phages. Phages evolved naturally in concert with their bacterial prey and resistance is simply part of the evolutionary landscape to phages. If the bacteria evolve one sort of resistance then the phages evolve a counter-strategy. Phages are massively successful and you can take from that, that resistance is a minor problem for the phage.
I don't want to hear anymore about how "big Pharma doesn't like phages", or that "phage purity and efficacy is an issue", or even that "Western doctors are uncomfortable with phages and prefer drug treatments". We need a Plan B and we need it big time. Phages are that Plan B.
Modern pharmaceuticals are a wonder and I'm not turning my back on that. However antibiotics have hit a wall in terms of resistance, pharma's unwillingness to create new antibiotics, and abuse of the deployment of antibiotics. It's a toxic combination and no one has a decent answer within the pharmaceutical realm. Time to bring in some new thinking (which ironically, has old roots).
http://arstechnica.com/science...
> "Some people argue that antibiotic-resistant strains that develop in food animals are largely irrelevant to human health because E. coli strains are relatively species-specific and so will not cause disease in people. This current study [5] shows that argument is flawed."
http://cid.oxfordjournals.org/content/49/2/202.full
Read about why the news media sucks and you shouldn't freak out. http://arstechnica.com/science...
if big pharma wouldn't insist on only selling patented stuff for the better of profits.
Other than through monopoly rents, how else is the advocate for a particular new treatment supposed to recoup the hundreds of millions of dollars needed to prove to the U.S. FDA that the treatment is safe and effective?
The original article has been corrected: "This story corrects headline, first and third paragraphs to show bacteria is resistant to last-resort antibiotic colistin, not all antibiotics"
There are products and natural supplements that can help against infection, bacteria and viruses.
Antibiotic-Resistant E Coli Reaches The US For The First Time
Yeah, right. Reaches my Ass.
Planted is about ninty-nine percent more likely.
Never atribute that which can be explained by greed, foul play or some other devious agenda to chance. Instead, think about the benificeraries of the event. More often than not, the simple answer is often the correct one.
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I for one welcome our new blue overlords!