4. burning DVDs for the large number of people who own a DVD player that happens not to have a USB input and don't already have a home theater PC.
I love/. sometimes. Careful analysis reveals that an optical drive can be used for burning files from BitTorrent, while missing the glaringly obvious: They put optical drives in laptops so people can play DVDs.
That's probably true in many places, but it's not universally true and certainly not in major cities. I drank tap water in Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, and Bangkok and never had any problems.
Back in Ye Olden Dayes, the telephone in our kitchen had a particularly long handset cord that would always get twisted up into a big ball. My mom would always complain about how ugly it looked. So one year for Christmas I bought her a cordless phone. It's not like she was particularly into getting electronic gadgets for Christmas, or that she was thinking she needed a new phone. But obviously she did.
I don't think it's self-serving insofar as it's still a USB key. If one of my friends gave me something like this, I'd probably already be using half the software and I'd have a newer version, too. But so what? I don't mind getting another USB key.
Besides, he said it was a "stocking stuffer"... he didn't say he was going to put it in a ten-by-ten box with a bow on it and leave it in the driveway like he was giving them a car.
I'm pretty confident that eating grass fed beef would expose you to less bacteria than corn fed.
I suppose. It's a theory. I'd want to see it tested. At the end of the day, bacteria gets introduced into the meat supply more at the slaughterhouse level than at the actual farming level. (You don't eat cow stomachs, typically; it's when they cut up the cow that the bacteria gets spread to the muscle.) In that sense, there's nothing that prevents grass-fed hamburger from being contaminated with E.coli. It's not as if the bacteria doesn't exist in grass-fed cow populations.
I was thinking more of the point that E. coil is E. coil, and if the strain that infects you has the right characteristics, you can get very sick, regardless of whether it is a resistant strain or not. The same is true of MRSA. People think of MRSA as "the really bad kind of staph," and it is, but not in the sense that it will harm you any faster or that it's any more "potent" that regular staph. It's just resistant, which means that the regular treatments won't work. So if you become infected with MRSA and you start taking the regular course of antibiotics, you will still have a staph infection that's essentially left untreated. Infections become problematic when they're allowed to fester, and that's what happens when you "treat" an infection with an antibiotic that it's resistant to. But otherwise it's exactly the same infection as if you'd had non-resistant staph.
So grass-fed meat can be contaminated with E. coli and that E. coli can make you ill. Maybe that particular strain of E. coli will be less likely to be resistant than one acquired from corn-fed beef, but that's beside the point. You'll still get sick. It will just be easier to cure you.
Right. And I would add that all this makes plague a good counterexample to what TFA is talking about. It hasn't become one of these resistant "superbugs" we're talking about, and given its profile it doesn't seem likely to become one anytime soon.
Resistant plague has been found, but as of 2007 there was only one reported case. Scientists still see it as a cause for concern, given how nasty plague can be if it goes untreated, but they're right on top of it and there's a long way to go before anyone needs to trip the alarms.
The problem with your argument is that we didn't "lose" to the Black Plague. It killed a lot of Europeans but it was unheard of in most other segments of the world, and the proof in the pudding is that we're here and the Black Plague is virtually nonexistent.
All untrue. The Black Plague was a pandemic, which means it was worldwide. It is believed to have begun in Asia. And plague (Y. pestis) has never been eradicated; outbreaks are still fairly common in animals, and thousands of cases are reported to the WHO every year. The biggest difference is that today we have antibiotics.
Just think about it. Within 50 years all disease will be conquered.
It's interesting that you should make this rant now. Your optimism is admirable, but this is exactly what was said right after World War II, when antibiotics were going mainstream and campaigns were launched to eradicate smallpox. They said bacteria would be eliminated and man would turn his attention to viruses, then cancer, and soon there would be no more disease. And look at the situation we are in with antibiotics today. And every few years we have a new "killer virus" scare, like the swine flu, or SARS, etc. And countless people still die of cancer. And now we have HIV/AIDS, and ebola, and so on. Human technology certainly is powerful and amazing, but as far as kicking nature's ass and living forever, we ain't remotely close to there yet.
Virtually *everything* we eat has traces of penicillin in it.
That's an exaggeration. I'd be willing to believe that everything we eat has traces of penicillum fungus on it -- almost -- but not all penicillum produces penicillin. To get penicillin in quantities that have meaningful antibiotic effects requires special environmental conditions -- hence why the people who cultivated it were awarded the Nobel prize.
The word is "blurb," and in this case you may abbreviate it without spelling it out, because being told the word "Klebsiella" tells you absolutely nothing that "K. pneumoniae" doesn't. There's no reason to waste space on words that confer no information except to scientists in the field.
Then again, it can be extremely difficult to kill all bacteria in hospitals. If you imagine a hospital, you think of lots of stainless steel furniture and smooth surfaces that are easy to clean. Nonetheless, studies have shown that bacteria can survive even the most advanced cleaning techniques. Either the cleaning wasn't thorough enough, or the bacteria were able to survive the chemical compound used. It's believed bacteria have been able to evolve some level of resistance. This doesn't necessarily mean that antibacterial compounds are aiding in developing the selective resistance of superbugs, but it does indicate that you shouldn't put too much faith in "the heavy guns," especially in places like hospitals, which contain high concentrations of resistant bacteria.
ps. antibacterial soap is for lazy people.
Only in the sense that you really have to go out of your way to find soap that contains no antibacterial compounds these days. But so what? Antibacterial soap is still soap.
The banana story has absolutely nothing to do with drug resistant bacteria. The reason an entire species of banana can be wiped out by a single pathogen is because farmed bananas, as they are produced today, are all genetic clones. (They are not necessarily even GMO; they are just clones.) Thus, cultivated bananas do not have the same genetic diversity that other species do; you're unlikely to find a single banana that has resistance to something that another banana does not. And that's why when one plant goes, they can all go. But this is a completely separate issue from how bacteria evolve resistance to antibiotics.
When they give me amoxicillin, I always know I'll be back for a round of something else (augmentin seems to work for most of what I get).
Well guess what? Augmentin is amoxicillin. It just includes another drug that can inhibit the bacteria's resistance to the amoxicillin. So if you really feel like amoxicillin doesn't work for you, just tell your doctor what you told us here. He might not believe you, but he might comply with your wish to get the augmentin, because it's the same drug anyway.
I'll second this. A while back I got an urge to cook some steaks, something I had never done much at home before. The first couple I made were from my local grocery, which sources its meat from small farms that produce organic, grass-fed beef. Later I was at the mass-market supermarket and noticed that their steaks were much cheaper, so I bought one. Once I cooked the meat, though, I realized why it was so cheap: It was totally flavorless. It really tasted like nothing, like cardboard. I still might buy hamburger from the supermarket, but for anything where I expect to enjoy the taste of the meat (e.g. I won't be putting a lot of sauce or seasoning on it), I'm sticking to organic, grass-fed beef from now on.
Yes, cattle are fed corn, because it is heavily subsidized, and this makes them ill. So cattle are raised on a diet of corn and antibiotics. Then we eat the meat, laced with antibiotics, and the viruses in our bloodstream mutate to brush off this rather mild onslaught.
No, that's not it. When you eat meat from animals that have been treated with antibiotics, the amount of effective antibiotics you're exposed to is going to be so minimal as to be at homeopathic levels. Then you cook the meat, which is likely to further break down any compounds in it.
Rather, the problem with giving livestock antibiotics is simply that it creates these resistant strains of bacteria, and then the bacteria escape the farmyard and move into the wild. The kind of bacteria that are in and around farm animals aren't so different from the ones that are found in and around human homes, and some of them can cause disease in humans (E. coli, for example).
Another problem is that many of the genes that confer antibiotic resistance exist on plasmids, which are little capsules of bacterial DNA that exist independently of bacterial cells. Plasmids can potentially move from one strain of bacteria to another. So, you might have one strain of harmless bacteria that gets exposed to a lot of antibiotics and develops resistance. If that bacterium later comes into contact with a harmful kind of bacteria, the plasmid could be transferred to the new bacterium, causing it to gain the same resistance.
So, again, the problem is not that the meat you buy contains antibiotics which causes your body to create bacteria with resistance; the problem is that the animals have already done this process for you, and you might be bringing home meat with that resistant bacteria on it.
Not buying beef that was raised on corn is a possible solution, but that just means you won't be raising superbugs, everyone else will still be doing it.
Here you're correct. Not buying beef raised on corn is pretty much just "voting with your dollar." It doesn't change the fact that the superbugs are still being created elsewhere. It doesn't really change your risk of exposure to harmful bacteria in any meaningful way, either (the same bacteria are probably on the meat that wasn't raised on corn and antibiotics; they just might be less likely to be the resistant kind).
USians pay for their medicine so they most likely are not prescribed as many by their doctors.
Not really. The visit to the doctor might cost them something -- say $25, if the patient has insurance. And most insurance plans have a flat fee for prescriptions, provided the prescription is for a generic/no-brand drug (which will be the case for most antibiotics) -- so the actual medicine might cost $10.
The stories you hear where people are paying hundreds of dollars per month for medicine are usually newer, brand-name drugs, which many insurance plans don't cover or only cover partially. Think new cancer drugs, or maintenance drugs for medical conditions like diabetes.
For simple antibiotics prescriptions, the story is much different. I had a sinus infection once, and my doctor diagnosed me and prescribed me a bottle of antibiotics in about five minutes. The infection did respond well to the antibiotics, but wasn't entirely gone by the time I'd finished the bottle -- so the doctor prescribed me another kind of antibiotics, without so much as batting an eye. I'm not saying I shouldn't have gotten the medicine in my particular case -- that infection was really incapacitating me by the time I went to the doctor -- but as far as I can tell, American doctors really do throw antibiotics around like they're candy. My doctors have never shown the slightest hesitation.
One of the key attributes of a bioweapon is controllability. You want it to hit who and where you want it to hit, and you DON'T want it to hit outside that area. In particular, you DON'T want it to be significantly contagious - and smallpox is one of the most horribly contagious diseases known to Man.
Smallpox is eminently controllable. We're so good at controlling it that it's been eradicated from the face of the Earth. We're so good at controlling it, in fact, that nobody in the U.S. (with the exception of some military personnel) has received a smallpox vaccination since 1972. The only thing that an enemy would need to "control it" would be to start vaccinating again.
The parts suffering are those who got screwed by external forces imposing demands on them, and instead of being like Iceland and telling the multinational banks to shove it
This is a pleasant fiction being floated around the Internet. In reality, Iceland is seeking to solve its economic woes by joining the EU, ditching its sovereign currency, and adopting the euro -- hardly telling the banks and foreign interests to "shove it."
Slashdot Mirror
4. burning DVDs for the large number of people who own a DVD player that happens not to have a USB input and don't already have a home theater PC.
I love /. sometimes. Careful analysis reveals that an optical drive can be used for burning files from BitTorrent, while missing the glaringly obvious: They put optical drives in laptops so people can play DVDs.
The original decision.
That's probably true in many places, but it's not universally true and certainly not in major cities. I drank tap water in Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, and Bangkok and never had any problems.
21 boffins study water for three years and they still can't come up with any conclusions as to wetness.
Back in Ye Olden Dayes, the telephone in our kitchen had a particularly long handset cord that would always get twisted up into a big ball. My mom would always complain about how ugly it looked. So one year for Christmas I bought her a cordless phone. It's not like she was particularly into getting electronic gadgets for Christmas, or that she was thinking she needed a new phone. But obviously she did.
I don't think it's self-serving insofar as it's still a USB key. If one of my friends gave me something like this, I'd probably already be using half the software and I'd have a newer version, too. But so what? I don't mind getting another USB key.
Besides, he said it was a "stocking stuffer"... he didn't say he was going to put it in a ten-by-ten box with a bow on it and leave it in the driveway like he was giving them a car.
I'm not sure exactly where this line of thought is going. Plague is not a good comparison for drug resistance.
I think you'll find that was exactly where my line of thought was going. TFA is about drug resistance, which isn't really the problem with plague.
I'm pretty confident that eating grass fed beef would expose you to less bacteria than corn fed.
I suppose. It's a theory. I'd want to see it tested. At the end of the day, bacteria gets introduced into the meat supply more at the slaughterhouse level than at the actual farming level. (You don't eat cow stomachs, typically; it's when they cut up the cow that the bacteria gets spread to the muscle.) In that sense, there's nothing that prevents grass-fed hamburger from being contaminated with E.coli. It's not as if the bacteria doesn't exist in grass-fed cow populations.
I was thinking more of the point that E. coil is E. coil, and if the strain that infects you has the right characteristics, you can get very sick, regardless of whether it is a resistant strain or not. The same is true of MRSA. People think of MRSA as "the really bad kind of staph," and it is, but not in the sense that it will harm you any faster or that it's any more "potent" that regular staph. It's just resistant, which means that the regular treatments won't work. So if you become infected with MRSA and you start taking the regular course of antibiotics, you will still have a staph infection that's essentially left untreated. Infections become problematic when they're allowed to fester, and that's what happens when you "treat" an infection with an antibiotic that it's resistant to. But otherwise it's exactly the same infection as if you'd had non-resistant staph.
So grass-fed meat can be contaminated with E. coli and that E. coli can make you ill. Maybe that particular strain of E. coli will be less likely to be resistant than one acquired from corn-fed beef, but that's beside the point. You'll still get sick. It will just be easier to cure you.
Right. And I would add that all this makes plague a good counterexample to what TFA is talking about. It hasn't become one of these resistant "superbugs" we're talking about, and given its profile it doesn't seem likely to become one anytime soon.
Resistant plague has been found, but as of 2007 there was only one reported case. Scientists still see it as a cause for concern, given how nasty plague can be if it goes untreated, but they're right on top of it and there's a long way to go before anyone needs to trip the alarms.
The problem with your argument is that we didn't "lose" to the Black Plague. It killed a lot of Europeans but it was unheard of in most other segments of the world, and the proof in the pudding is that we're here and the Black Plague is virtually nonexistent.
All untrue. The Black Plague was a pandemic, which means it was worldwide. It is believed to have begun in Asia. And plague (Y. pestis) has never been eradicated; outbreaks are still fairly common in animals, and thousands of cases are reported to the WHO every year. The biggest difference is that today we have antibiotics.
Just think about it. Within 50 years all disease will be conquered.
It's interesting that you should make this rant now. Your optimism is admirable, but this is exactly what was said right after World War II, when antibiotics were going mainstream and campaigns were launched to eradicate smallpox. They said bacteria would be eliminated and man would turn his attention to viruses, then cancer, and soon there would be no more disease. And look at the situation we are in with antibiotics today. And every few years we have a new "killer virus" scare, like the swine flu, or SARS, etc. And countless people still die of cancer. And now we have HIV/AIDS, and ebola, and so on. Human technology certainly is powerful and amazing, but as far as kicking nature's ass and living forever, we ain't remotely close to there yet.
Next time I have an ear infection, I'll try that.
Virtually *everything* we eat has traces of penicillin in it.
That's an exaggeration. I'd be willing to believe that everything we eat has traces of penicillum fungus on it -- almost -- but not all penicillum produces penicillin. To get penicillin in quantities that have meaningful antibiotic effects requires special environmental conditions -- hence why the people who cultivated it were awarded the Nobel prize.
The word is "blurb," and in this case you may abbreviate it without spelling it out, because being told the word "Klebsiella" tells you absolutely nothing that "K. pneumoniae" doesn't. There's no reason to waste space on words that confer no information except to scientists in the field.
Of course. It's never lupus.
Then again, it can be extremely difficult to kill all bacteria in hospitals. If you imagine a hospital, you think of lots of stainless steel furniture and smooth surfaces that are easy to clean. Nonetheless, studies have shown that bacteria can survive even the most advanced cleaning techniques. Either the cleaning wasn't thorough enough, or the bacteria were able to survive the chemical compound used. It's believed bacteria have been able to evolve some level of resistance. This doesn't necessarily mean that antibacterial compounds are aiding in developing the selective resistance of superbugs, but it does indicate that you shouldn't put too much faith in "the heavy guns," especially in places like hospitals, which contain high concentrations of resistant bacteria.
ps. antibacterial soap is for lazy people.
Only in the sense that you really have to go out of your way to find soap that contains no antibacterial compounds these days. But so what? Antibacterial soap is still soap.
The banana story has absolutely nothing to do with drug resistant bacteria. The reason an entire species of banana can be wiped out by a single pathogen is because farmed bananas, as they are produced today, are all genetic clones. (They are not necessarily even GMO; they are just clones.) Thus, cultivated bananas do not have the same genetic diversity that other species do; you're unlikely to find a single banana that has resistance to something that another banana does not. And that's why when one plant goes, they can all go. But this is a completely separate issue from how bacteria evolve resistance to antibiotics.
When they give me amoxicillin, I always know I'll be back for a round of something else (augmentin seems to work for most of what I get).
Well guess what? Augmentin is amoxicillin. It just includes another drug that can inhibit the bacteria's resistance to the amoxicillin. So if you really feel like amoxicillin doesn't work for you, just tell your doctor what you told us here. He might not believe you, but he might comply with your wish to get the augmentin, because it's the same drug anyway.
I'll second this. A while back I got an urge to cook some steaks, something I had never done much at home before. The first couple I made were from my local grocery, which sources its meat from small farms that produce organic, grass-fed beef. Later I was at the mass-market supermarket and noticed that their steaks were much cheaper, so I bought one. Once I cooked the meat, though, I realized why it was so cheap: It was totally flavorless. It really tasted like nothing, like cardboard. I still might buy hamburger from the supermarket, but for anything where I expect to enjoy the taste of the meat (e.g. I won't be putting a lot of sauce or seasoning on it), I'm sticking to organic, grass-fed beef from now on.
Yes, cattle are fed corn, because it is heavily subsidized, and this makes them ill. So cattle are raised on a diet of corn and antibiotics. Then we eat the meat, laced with antibiotics, and the viruses in our bloodstream mutate to brush off this rather mild onslaught.
No, that's not it. When you eat meat from animals that have been treated with antibiotics, the amount of effective antibiotics you're exposed to is going to be so minimal as to be at homeopathic levels. Then you cook the meat, which is likely to further break down any compounds in it.
Rather, the problem with giving livestock antibiotics is simply that it creates these resistant strains of bacteria, and then the bacteria escape the farmyard and move into the wild. The kind of bacteria that are in and around farm animals aren't so different from the ones that are found in and around human homes, and some of them can cause disease in humans (E. coli, for example).
Another problem is that many of the genes that confer antibiotic resistance exist on plasmids, which are little capsules of bacterial DNA that exist independently of bacterial cells. Plasmids can potentially move from one strain of bacteria to another. So, you might have one strain of harmless bacteria that gets exposed to a lot of antibiotics and develops resistance. If that bacterium later comes into contact with a harmful kind of bacteria, the plasmid could be transferred to the new bacterium, causing it to gain the same resistance.
So, again, the problem is not that the meat you buy contains antibiotics which causes your body to create bacteria with resistance; the problem is that the animals have already done this process for you, and you might be bringing home meat with that resistant bacteria on it.
Not buying beef that was raised on corn is a possible solution, but that just means you won't be raising superbugs, everyone else will still be doing it.
Here you're correct. Not buying beef raised on corn is pretty much just "voting with your dollar." It doesn't change the fact that the superbugs are still being created elsewhere. It doesn't really change your risk of exposure to harmful bacteria in any meaningful way, either (the same bacteria are probably on the meat that wasn't raised on corn and antibiotics; they just might be less likely to be the resistant kind).
USians pay for their medicine so they most likely are not prescribed as many by their doctors.
Not really. The visit to the doctor might cost them something -- say $25, if the patient has insurance. And most insurance plans have a flat fee for prescriptions, provided the prescription is for a generic/no-brand drug (which will be the case for most antibiotics) -- so the actual medicine might cost $10.
The stories you hear where people are paying hundreds of dollars per month for medicine are usually newer, brand-name drugs, which many insurance plans don't cover or only cover partially. Think new cancer drugs, or maintenance drugs for medical conditions like diabetes.
For simple antibiotics prescriptions, the story is much different. I had a sinus infection once, and my doctor diagnosed me and prescribed me a bottle of antibiotics in about five minutes. The infection did respond well to the antibiotics, but wasn't entirely gone by the time I'd finished the bottle -- so the doctor prescribed me another kind of antibiotics, without so much as batting an eye. I'm not saying I shouldn't have gotten the medicine in my particular case -- that infection was really incapacitating me by the time I went to the doctor -- but as far as I can tell, American doctors really do throw antibiotics around like they're candy. My doctors have never shown the slightest hesitation.
That Corel hand coded Wordperfect in assembly? I ask you, where are they now?
Errr... you do know that Corel didn't create WordPerfect -- it bought it -- right? And, BTW... that Corel is still around?
One of the key attributes of a bioweapon is controllability. You want it to hit who and where you want it to hit, and you DON'T want it to hit outside that area. In particular, you DON'T want it to be significantly contagious - and smallpox is one of the most horribly contagious diseases known to Man.
Smallpox is eminently controllable. We're so good at controlling it that it's been eradicated from the face of the Earth. We're so good at controlling it, in fact, that nobody in the U.S. (with the exception of some military personnel) has received a smallpox vaccination since 1972. The only thing that an enemy would need to "control it" would be to start vaccinating again.
We know that the governments of the United States and Russia have access to smallpox in laboratories.
As for weaponized smallpox, Google "Aralsk incident."
The parts suffering are those who got screwed by external forces imposing demands on them, and instead of being like Iceland and telling the multinational banks to shove it
This is a pleasant fiction being floated around the Internet. In reality, Iceland is seeking to solve its economic woes by joining the EU, ditching its sovereign currency, and adopting the euro -- hardly telling the banks and foreign interests to "shove it."