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Bacteria Becoming Resistant To Hospital Disinfectants, Warn Scientists (theguardian.com)
Hospitals will need to use new strategies to tackle bacteria experts have warned, after finding a type of hospital superbug is becoming increasingly tolerant of alcohol -- the key component of current disinfectant hand rubs. From a report: Handwashes based on alcohols such as isopropanol have become commonplace as a method of infection control. But while the move has been linked to benefits, including a fall in rates of hospital infections of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), new research suggests it might also have had unexpected consequences. Scientists say they have discovered that superbugs known as vancomycin-resistant enterococci, or VRE, appear to be becoming more tolerant to alcohol.
If the bugs go blind, they might have more difficulties to infect us.
LOTS of people die there..
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
"Bacteria Becoming Resistant To Hospital Disinfectants, Warn Scientists" - I don't like the fact they are becoming resistant, but at least they had the decency to warn us about it.
This is bad because cleanrooms essentially rely on 98% IPA in order to kill and remove all foreign bacteria. If it's ineffective, all cleanrooms will have to change all of their procedures. We're talking 100's billions $$$ cost.
Handwashes based on alcohols such as isopropanol have become commonplace as a method of infection control.
Forget isopropanol, I'm saturating everything to whisky. You bugs can have the outside, I'm going to take care of my insides.
Is anybody surprised? We used it for everything, and now the survivors are coming back with a vengeance. (Actually just coming back immune -- anthropomorphism is for zombies.)
If only we could take the Religious Never-Evolvers and mate them with the Flat-Earthers -- then we could push them all off the edge of the Earth to be closer to God. (Or that giant turtle. Same thing. Hope he's not a snapping turtle.)
If the universe is someone's simulation -- does that mean the stars are just stuck pixels?
Will kill anything.
What we need to do is find a suitable bacteriophage variant that can obliterate MRSA. It's not a permanent fix but it will buy us more time to figure out how to engineer bacteriophages.
Bacteriophages and eventually engineered bacteriophages seem like the likely future for fighting bacterial infection. It also seems like machine learning would be a good fit for developing bacteriophage variants when resistant mutations are found.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Starting a sentence with "But while" makes you look stupid. Try "Although" instead.
We don't know whether the exposure to alcohol based disinfectants is driving the tolerance adaptation. It is premature and flawed to assume so.
An isopropyl alcohol bath is resoundingly insufficient to sterilize surgical instruments. This has been known for decades. Likewise, nobody in their right mind assumes a quick wipe with an alcohol pad will make your skin sterile either. Thus this news story adds nothing really new, except that some MRSA bugs may have become somewhat more resistant to a halfhearted swat of alcohol. Stop the presses...
I once observed Pseudomonas aeruginosa survive fully submerged in 95% ethanol for over a week.
Hand sanitiser is a placebo.
The best way to kill bacteria is good old fashioned soap and mechanical abrasion (elbow grease with a scrub brush).
This doesn't solve the hand wash problem, but I think hospitals should try cleaning with a steam vapor cleaner. An industrial-quality steam cleaner is not that expensive, and it just takes water and electricity to run. And I don't think there are many germs that can survive temperatures higher than the boiling point of water.
Industrial steam cleaners can reach temperatures of over 340 degrees F (171 degrees C) inside their boilers, but what matters is the temperature of the steam when it exits the cleaning wand, and that can easily be 215 to 230 degrees F (101 to 110 degrees C).
Here's an article about a test at University of Washington: https://www.asumag.com/maintenance/steaming-clean
I personally bought a consumer-grade steam cleaner (a Vapamore MR-100) and I have been happy with it. I bought it to kill some mold without using chemicals and it worked perfectly.
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Whatever's not done already:
1. Find out how various disinfectants work at the cellular level.
2. Select 3 or 4 different ones that are otherwise fairly safe, but that operate in very different ways.
3. Mix them into a new product.
4. Use it.
See, simultaneous adaptation across multiple (say, four) different sterilization vectors (this would work for internal antibiotics too) is like throwing down four poles onto an adaptation space and hope they all form an octopus x on the same point.
Invent a new, use until it doesn't work, repeat, is a failure mode. You are literally doing the best optimal way to make germ killers be useless as fast as possible.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
> Handwashes based on alcohols
Instead of using half-assed over the counter cleaning products, maybe they should use real sterilization techniques such as heating, or chemicals that actually destroy organic matter.
This is the same BS that happened with penicillin etc.
Yeah, if you give every single farm animal half a dose per day, everything is going to grow resistant.
i bet they can't resist SILVER nanoparticles.
nothing is supposed to be resistant against silver.
Create a bacteria that is resistant to everything. Go extinct. Let the bacteria evolve into a new super human race.
Clorox. This is the only bleach you can buy without a license to properly kill MRSA bugs.
When someone says "(some bacteria) is becoming resistant to (some specific antibiotic)" that means when that antibiotic is used, most but not all the bacteria is killed. The few bacteria that survive are likely resistant to that antibiotic through some random genetic mutation and when it reproduces/divides the resulting new bacteria will have that same resistance. When you repeat this many times (and bacteria in general reproduces very quickly) you end up with new generations that suddenly ALL have that resistance to that specific antibiotic. The new surviving bacteria has evolved over the years to be resistant to specific antibiotics.
SCIENCE!!!
I had mrsa... and vancomycin via iv...it entered (the mrsa) and infected my blood, artificial stomach, skin, emergency trac site and lungs. four months later I managed to live after all the infection were gone. thank god for vancomycin!
nothing to see here - move along
Maybe concentrating all the sick people in one place creates a perfect breeding ground for this stuff.
Yes, yes, there are valid economic reasons for maximizing the work output of doctors, who are exceedingly expensive to mint. But at some point, the downfall of our species might just be more costly.
Those scientists Just want more free alcohol for uh, "testing"...
in this country. I've been hearing about this for years and nobody's doing much of anything about it. Certainly not enough. Meanwhile in the United States we've got a resurgence of things like Faith Healers and the like (plus numbskulls pushing Homeopathy and "Essential Oils"). It doesn't help that we don't have universal healthcare so I know a ton of people turned away from science because they just plain can't afford medical care. Faith Healers & Homeopathy are still cheaper than a doctor visit over here. And don't get me started on the number of folks I knew who saved antibiotics for the next time they got sick because it costs $200 bucks to have a doctor write the script...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Even if we make hospitals smaller and let people stay at home, there will still be places which have to be routinely sterilised, e.g. surgical operating rooms. At some point we will need to find methods to which it is impossible to develop resistance. We can possibly line everything with single use wraps which will later go to an incinerator. A wrap like this will protect the patient from contamination by the room, and the room from contamination by the patient.
Captcha: tidiness
And who do we have to blame for this state off affairs?
Why the poultry industry of course who decided it was a good idea to use a last line human defense anti-biotic to reduce the gut bacteria of chickens so they would grow faster.
So there is a consequences of us allowing these cunts to be cunts to the humble chicken.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Looks like we're going to have to start washing our hands after we've been to the toilet. The number of people who don't do this is frightening. It's not just that your hand has touched your dick or your vag or whatever, it's that you're not washing your hands at all during the day, then preparing food or eating with your hands, or touching door handles that others have touched, or coughed into your hand, or let the dog lick your hand etc. People who don't wash their hands after going to the toilet should be treated the same as anti-vaxxers.
Infection control in about every hospital I've set foot in in the last 14 years will tell you hand sanitizer doesn't do shit for VRE - wash your hands.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
Alcohol kills 99.9% of bacteria. “We found that the new isolates, post-2010, were 10 times more tolerant to alcohol exposure than the earlier isolates" is the quote they're using. So...that's still not enough to infect someone. now I know that 99.9% of a blanket rate for all bacteria combined but still, 1000x would be concerning, not 10x. Although this does seem incredibly odd. Alcohol has been used to kill bacteria for what,10,000 years for billions of humans? It's such basic cellular chemistry it's like saying bacteria are becoming resistant to 200 degree heat. It just simply cannot happen. Maybe by some fluke they're 10x more resistant but I seriously doubt that it will progress a whole lot further than that. It's not chemically possible. The materials that would make up the bacteria's cells would be SO different and SO exotic at that point, it probably wouldn't even be able to interact with a human body anymore.
More like an expected consequence.
Agreed. I think eventually this will evolve into remote diagnoses and treatments. There's no need to physically interact with a patient if you can have a set of remotely controlled robotic arms do it instead.
This reminds me of a big scandal in Romania involving a firm called Hexi Pharma who was the major distributor of dissinfectants to all .ro hospitals.
They were found to dillute the cleaning substances so they sell more to the hospitals in the last 10 years or so.
This of course coincides in time with the situation described in TFA. ...
And watch them die from delerium tremens
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I was thinking maybe it is time for a whole new strategy for managing infection. Trying to prevent 100% of infections is failing, as TFA illustrates. perhaps a different approach of allowing less dangerous infections in order to crowd out the resistant strains. Or somehow deliberately cultivating non-harmful strains. In how many other fields of endeavor do we manage a risk rather than uselessly strive to 100% prevent it? Also, hospitals are extremely hidebound organizations in my experience, thanks mainly to doctors who never leave adolescence and thus think they already know everything.
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This news is nothing new and has been reported since at least the 1990's. Here is a report from 1997: https://www.journalofhospitali...
Just wanted to make sure you don't run around thinking the sky is falling, I realize it can be difficult to separate reality from proclamations of the apocalypse.
I've wondered why the touch surfaces in hospitals aren't made from raw copper or raw wood. Even if they'd have to be replaced more frequently.
Plastics & lacquered surfaces scratch easily & give bugs a place to hide during cleaning.
You're already crawling with bacteria: you can't colonize yourself with harmless bacteria to keep safe from the harmful ones... you are already colonized. The harmful strains can share the plasmids with the genes to cause illness with other strains, as well.