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WHO Issues a List of 12 Most Worrying Drug-Resistant Bacteria (medicalxpress.com)
Artem Tashkinov quotes a report from Medical Xpress: The World Health Organization has issued a list of the top dozen bacteria most dangerous to humans, warning that doctors are fast running out of treatment options. WHO said the most-needed drugs are for germs that threaten hospitals, nursing homes and among patients who need ventilators or catheters. The agency said the dozen listed resistant bacteria are increasingly untreatable and can cause fatal infections; most typically strike people with weakened immune systems. At the top of WHO's list is Acinetobacter baumannii, a group of bacteria that cause a range of diseases from pneumonia to blood or wound infections. In recent years, health officials have detected a few patients resistant to colistin, the antibiotic of last resort. So far, doctors have been able to treat them with other drugs. But experts worry that the colistin-resistant bacteria will spread their properties to other bacteria already resistant to more commonly used antibiotics, creating germs that can't be killed by any known drugs.
The state of Washington is even more communist than California. It approaches European level.
Since the linked article is still a few clicks away from the actual list, which is then a PDF, here is the actual list:
Priority 1: CRITICAL
Acinetobacter baumannii, carbapenem-resistant
Pseudomonas aeruginosa, carbapenem-resistant
Enterobacteriaceae, carbapenem-resistant, 3rd generation cephalosporin-resistant
Priority 2: HIGH
Enterococcus faecium, vancomycin-resistant
Staphylococcus aureus, methicillin-resistant, vancomycin intermediate and resistant
Helicobacter pylori, clarithromycin-resistant
Campylobacter, fluoroquinolone-resistant
Salmonella spp., fluoroquinolone-resistant
Neisseria gonorrhoeae, 3rd generation cephalosporin-resistant, fluoroquinolone-resistant
Priority 3: MEDIUM
Streptococcus pneumoniae, penicillin-non-susceptible
Haemophilus influenzae, ampicillin-resistant
Shigella spp., fluoroquinolone-resistant
Source: http://www.who.int/medicines/p...
A long time slashdot user, I have been offered the opportunity to disable ads in the sidebar on the classic.slashdot.org main page, but wanting to support the site I never disabled it.
Recently however there have been annoying ads that stay "stickied" on top even when you scroll down and it has been driving me nuts, so finally I decided to use the option. Except it has disappeared! What happened? Does the option only appear under certain circumstances? Did the new overlords remove it and I simply missed my chance?
The president says he's going to get us out of WHO, so problem solved.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Maybe genetically engineering a meta-virus which will modify those in the wild?
Requiem for the American Dream
Hi I've never flamed on Slashdot but about 60% of my browser screen is ads. The top 40% and the right 20%. This is intolerable, so even though my "karma" is excellent and my signup number is low seven figures, I'm outtahere.
It is common knowledge that [iodine] was used widely in hospitals for decades, and supposedly(?) resistance is not built up to it.
But iodine, and most iodine-containing medical preparations, are heavily restricted, due to the drug war.
Seems they're used in one step of turning pseudephedrine into meth. So, though they're not actually BANNED, the drug warriors put so much red tape on them that most chain-store drug stores just dropped them as unprofitable.
(I found this out when the fallout from Fukishima was approaching the US west coast, and I tried to find some iodine supplements for my family to dose up on, to reduce the risk from radioiodine, before it got here. Surprise! None to be had.)
If anybody knows of a chain store in California or Nevada where I can buy potassium iodide supplements or tincture of iodine, over the counter, please let me know.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Welcome to healthcare as practiced in civilised countries. It's probably quite a shock.
Meta-comment: stating uncomfortable truths != trolling.
Requiem for the American Dream
A properly administered free-market system that allows insurers to cross state lines and removes a lot of the useless regulatory BS that makes practitioners hesitant to treat people will save tens, possibly hundreds of thousands of people who will otherwise die thanks to the Obamacare act.
Bullshit. Pure, unmitigated bullshit. America has the most expensive healthcare system in the world. Here's a clue for the clueless: it's not because of government regulation, and it was the most expensive in the world (and one of the worst) even before Obama was elected. The "socialist" healthcare systems of Europe are both cheaper and also better. Yeah, libertarianism works great --when you've never been outside your basement.
Here's what laissez-faire capitalist healthcare really looks like: the health care conglomerates soak sick people for all they can take, because sick people don't have the resources to bargain. Then, when they run out of money, you let them die. For the conglomerates, it's like a money spigot.
For the sick people, of course, it's a death trap with the added feature that it bankrupts you, too.
Before antibiotics one could get an antiserum against each of many nasty infections. The rise of antibiotics displaced these drugs - even for some things (such as some forms of meningitis) where an antiserum against the particular organism, did a better job.
This actually made some sense. Antibiotics were broader spectrum, so (even after drug resistant bugs became common) you were likely to find one that worked in time to save the patient. Antisera, on the other hand, were very bug-specific.
If multiple drug resistance makes antibiotics nearly useless, perhaps it's time to revive antiserum use.
We now have the technology to rapidly identify the target organism(s) in a disease process, so we can rapidly select the correct magic bullets. And we also have the technology to make specific antisera by the bucketful.
And without the side-effects of making it by exposing an animal (like a "serum horse") to a pathogen and then (once it's developed an immunity) extracting the (horse-type) antibodies to this - and to everything else its immune system doesn't like - to make the drug. Instead we can make human monoclonal antibodies to just one target.
We can also engineer an immunization by chopping out the DNA for some conserved region snippet of some pathogen's accessible surface markers, splicing it with neighboring coding that will make the immune system take note and building it into an otherwise (and still) harmless bug - either to make an active ingredient for an immunization cocktail or a variola/polio style live-virus challenge. The bug has a very hard time evolving resistance because a conserved region of some component of its molecular machinery is usually conserved because has to be the way it is for it to work.
This is already being done to some extent. Seems to me it's time to stop crying about the end of antibiotics and focus on this set of approaches - which should be very lasting.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Despite all the pesky warning and regulations preventing this very situation, we managed to get around all of it and create the most dangerous bacteria that human-kind has ever seen! Everyone, give yourselves a pat on the back because we earned this. I hope you all got biohazard suits so you can safely watch humanity get ravaged by our new little "friends"! ;)
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
And please bring back the copper clads in the hospital, door plates, stairs, door knobs, bedsides, chairs etc.
Copper kills bacteria, including the antibiotic-resistant ones, everybody knows that, except apparently the hospital staffs.
Silver also, but that might be a bit too expensive.
Dead bacteria can not be transferred to other people...
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
As if this wasn't already the case before Obamacare.
Off-topic!
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
They felt that the income from a justifiable extra day in the hospital combined with not having the consequences of ineffective antibiotics was to their benefit.
For the sick people, of course, it's a death trap...
And if you're not sick already, then beware!
Official marketing target of the pharmaceutical companies: Each person on earth 2 medications daily.
And they're not so ethical as to shun away from committing hidden crimes against humanity to reach that goal.
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
That's why I proposed copper.
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
> If anybody knows of a chain store in California or Nevada where I can buy potassium iodide supplements or tincture of iodine, over the counter, please let me know.
The very first place I tried was Walgreens. You didn't say what part of California, so at random I checked availability in San Francisco. Here's one brand:
https://www.walgreens.com/stor...
Of course Amazon will deliver it right to your door.
Your difficulty finding it may indeed have something to do with illegal drugs. Not quite in the way you were thinking, it seems.
For some time, Targeted alpha therapy has shown promise for treating difficult cancers, but it may also be used to kill antibiotic-resistant bacteria and pathogens like HIV. Once this capability is developed, the antibiotic arms race will end once and for all. The looming threat is very serious, and such promising research should be a high priority.
Unfortunately, there are artificial barriers that are retarding progress. The most attractive isotopes for use with TAT are Actinium-225 and Bismuth-213, which no longer exist in nature. Looking at the periodic table, one might be inclined to believe that other substitutes exist, but they simply don’t. The neptunium decay chain is unique in that it does not pass through radon or terminate in lead. Born in supernovae long ago, it was extinct in nature until relatively recently, when it was revived in the heart of nuclear reactors.
However, conventional reactors don’t produce much, and it is impractical to extract the short-lived isotopes from solid fuel rods sealed in a reactor core. Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors however, are the ideal machines for producing these life-saving medical isotopes. Meanwhile, LFTR safely transforms nuclear waste into abundant and inexpensive energy.
It is worth noting that Flibe Energy is the only company in the west pursuing this technology; others developing molten salt reactors are trying to take shortcuts which miss out on the greatest benefits of the thorium fuel cycle. LFTR is a comprehensive solution, which can finally close the fuel cycle, eliminating the need for uranium mining and enrichment. It is a more challenging design, but it doesn’t kick the can down the road; it fully addresses all rational concerns with nuclear technology, and offers many new opportunities.
If they kill bacteria with antibiotics, yes. If they kill bacteria with alcohol (which is usually the case), then no, they are not bad and will not breed super-bacteria.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
If the bacteria are outside of a person, bleach does an excellent job of killing them.
If a person with bacteria takes bleach, it does an excellent job of killing them.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
No matter how many studies about antibiotics resistance, still in the US they keep on feeding antibiotics to cattle to make them grow slightly faster to make slightly more money. All this at the long term risk of killing most of us. No, that's not hyperbole: before the invention of antibiotics, one skin infection out of 9 was deadly. Yes, a bit of pus in a scrape, deadly one time out of 9, let that soak in (the idea, not the pus).
./ a decade ago where a moron was defending this feeding, saying "no studies have shown any risk". Then a few years later some studies started tracing out the DNA origin of some resistances and pinpointed them to some US industrial farms, I wanted to find our exchange of posts and rub it in "told you so", but ./ message search sucks ass and I could never find them.
I remember a discussion about that here on
Non-Linux Penguins ?
I'm a Brit (on disability welfare myself actually), and I'm pretty sure I'd be dead without socialised healthcare. Which, also, has fuck all to do with the quality of healthcare available. If you want shorter waiting times for non-critical conditions (the ones that require something fancy like major surgery but that you can easily survive a few months or so waiting for), doctors more willing to try very expensive and not very successful treatments etc, nothing stops you from having private health insurance and seeing private doctors, if you can afford it. The only difference is that if you can't afford it, you still have access to free, high quality healthcare. I've never understood this argument - it's not like having socialised healthcare makes private healthcare illegal.
Spot on. I'm a Brit too and would be quite happy spending my whole life paying into the NHS without ever having to use it.
The American system where you can get hit with a disease, or have an accident, and then die because you can't afford the treatment is barbaric and medieval.
"America has the most expensive healthcare system in the world" ..."
"Yeah, libertarianism works great
Libertarianism? In the USA healthcare system? LMFAO.
Where exactly do Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare, bans on free trade of prescription drugs and the tons of other government regulations fit into your definition of "libertarianism"?
In 2016, the federal government spent over $900 BILLION on Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare subsidies and other socialized healthcare programs. Due to federal government regulation, prescription drug in the USA can cost 5x, 10x, 20x ... as much as the exact same drug in Canada, Mexico or other countries. Removing that federal ban would save us tens of billions of dollars at minimum. Mandates on insurance policies prevent people from buying the exact coverage they want. Medicare & Medicaid price controls force providers to shift costs onto the privately insured & absolutely rape the working uninsured.
The U.S. Government has been heavily involved in the healthcare system for over 50 years! What are the results of their interventions? Skyrocketing prices, millions unable to afford basic services & quality which, as you noted, lags behind other countries.
Are there ANY other goods or services which, over that same time period, have experienced such ridiculous price increases for such lackluster quality(except housing and higher ed, which are also big government clusterfucks) Hell no! Even medical-related services like Lasik eye surgery have become better and cheaper.
Innovation & competition bring down prices. Government intervention has the opposite effect.
just a thought to maybe call the bill and melinda gates foundation.
Someone can't accept new nuclear, even to save their own life. Chances are very good that you or someone close to you will die from cancer someday, which could have been preventable if ideology didn't blind you. If the fools in government weren't more interested in weapons than energy, this technology would be saving countless lives today, and inexpensive carbon-free energy would be the norm. There is a good article detailing the specifics and history of LFTR for those with a mind open to facts.
The crusade by some to eliminate nuclear above all else will mean missing carbon targets if successful. Respected climate scientists like James Hansen agree that we can't afford to dismiss nuclear. Those working to obstruct nuclear progress also ensure that first generation reactors remain in service far longer than necessary.
And all Obamacare did was put a band-aid over it. Instead of addressing the real issues, like why medicines, surgeries, and hospitals are so damn expensive, and why malpractice is (ostensibly) rampant, it just shifted how the costs are paid. For some people, it was a boon, for others, it made their situation worse. It was rushed into law without proper debate and revision.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
It's just as toxic, and it has better corrosion resistance.
Note to hospitals: the oligodynamic effect is your friend - please start relying upon it!
Bloomberg Businessweek a few months ago did an article based on research that found use of heavy duty antibiotics in seafood (mostly shrimp) farming in China. Drugs like colistin are being used. The article talked about how waste from pig farming is somehow used to feed the farmed shrimp. Improting "food" like this into the States is obviously illegal. To add insult to injury, there are shell companies in China, Thailand, etc. set up for the sole purpose of circumventing those legal controls, and the shrimp ends up in North American grocery stores and restaurants. It speculated that perhaps there are these super bad bacteria coming over with them.
Dr. Who, that's WHO.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
System wide failings and uncoordinated care are not malpractice in the conventional sense, unless you want to consider it malpractice on the part of civilized society. In fact, this rise of drug resistant bacteria can be considered a subset of those system wide failings and uncoordinated care.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
Easy solution, use temporal discardable pavilions for specific patients and treatments. Should be easy to design. Unless, of course, there IS some psychosis strain that gets a kick from thinking people infected and unable to do anything, subject to the elements and State of Nature again, without choices and overwhelmed, entertained in its own gross infections and diseases development and doctors subscribing the ideology for these clients...
But Medicare is the part of the US medical system that works best, by objective quantitative measures. Lowest costs, and best outcomes compared to other countries. Not just comparable outcomes; if you make it to Medicare age in the US, your life expectancy becomes highest in the developed world. That's Medicare, you know, the single payer government socialized universal health program.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.