Superbugs!

Discussion in 'Health Care' started by OldMercsRule, Mar 2, 2012.

  1. OldMercsRule

    OldMercsRule Member

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    "“Untreatable gonorrhea” joins the ranks of infectious bogeymen.

    A recent paper in the New England Journal of Medicine called “The Emerging Threat of Untreatable Gonococcal Infection” suggests that gonorrhea is set to join the superbugs, the elite circle of nightmarish infections (MRSA, XDR-tuberculosis, NDM-1) that some fear will sweep civilization off its pins. The new breed of sexually-transmitted infection, first spotted in Japan, is resistant to the cephalosporin class of antibiotics, which puts it in position to run the table on available treatments and knock us back into a Fred Flintstone, pre-antibiotic world.

    As an infectious disease specialist, I am sort of flattered by the attention my homeboys are getting. After all, I have been thinking about, worrying about, and dreading these microbes for a long time and have limitless respect for their heartless lethality.

    But I have to ask, people, why all the excitement? As a looming public-health calamity for John Q Citizen as he walks down Maple Street in Middletown USA, the threat is minuscule (particularly if John Q can remember to keep his pecker in his pants). As with the avian flu massacre that never was and the smallpox pandemic that never came, this Superbug fascination seems to be more about our peculiar love of fear itself (cf: Stephen King, Paranormal Activity, the Republican debates) than any sober consideration of the risk before us.

    Beyond its fear-factor potential, the superbug story has legs because of something entirely different. The use and misuse of antibiotics has become one of the central morality tales of our time. All the key elements are there—our adolescent inability to control our appetites and the resultant waste of promising youth (alas, penicillin, I knew ye well); individual profligacy creating communal pain; and worst of all, scalding selfishness. Reading about superbugs has come to resemble John Bunyan following the Pilgrim in his progress more than a story of chemistry and microbiology and snippets of DNA that drift left rather than right.

    Yet lost in the hurry to embrace this particular sky-is-falling medical story is an important and revealing fact: not all superbugs take the same path to ignominy. Gonorrhea, for example, hasn't moved to the front of the line on account of our pharmaceutical gluttony. There's another mortal sin at work: Lust. People like to have sex, and with each condom-free act, bacteria swarm from this body part to that again and again, yes, and one more time, yes yes. Yes. Simply put, the sheer velocity of people hooking up has overwhelmed our flimsy antibiotic defense.

    In contrast, the superbugs that have been long-term headliners earned their stripes (the story goes) through a toxic mix of uncaring doctors, grasping patients, dim-witted public health officials, greedy drug companies, people who don’t wash their hands, and tons of antibiotics shoveled into the mouths of farm animals. In this godless world, available antibiotics are systematically misapplied, too much for some, not enough for others, until, at the far end of the bug-drug wrestling match, the only one left standing is super-whatever. John Bunyan, meet the mother lode: A world where everyone is guilty.

    But our dramatic self-flagellation—alas, if only the trustees of medicine’s covenant had been more restrained, more mature, more caring about the real things that matter, then perhaps none of this would have happened—is just so much posturing and mugging for the camera. After all, antibiotic resistance has been with us from the day antibiotics were hatched in Fleming’s moldy lab; it’s an immutable part of the program. Antibiotic activity and antibiotic resistance are like credit and debt—you can’t have one without the other. And, as we learned from highly active antiviral agents against HIV, the more potent the compound, the faster resistance emerges.

    In this long-running superbug drama, we humans are giving ourselves far too much credit for making the mess. This is about the power of bacteria, not the weakness of man. Yes, we can do a better job shepherding our patrimony, using common sense and restraint to maintain antibiotics’ fresh edge. But we will lose—always—and not because we are a fat, lazy society that, through indolence, inattention to detail, and blatant disregard of those around us, has created a dark and dangerous world.

    Rather we are pawns in a game between bits of microbial DNA, crude chemical structures, and a human body with more bacteria in and on it than that person’s number of normal human cells. Our insistence that we are the ones driving this enormous complex over the cliff disregards the basic facts. More disturbingly it reveals an all-too-familiar Master of the Universe insistence that we are the cause of everything on the planet, good and bad. It's too bad there is no biological phenomenon like drug resistance to undo the suffocating certainty of the narcissist."

    http://www.slate.com/articles/healt...and_the_rest_of_the_so_called_superbugs_.html

    Hmmmmmmm................
     
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  2. waltky

    waltky Well-Known Member

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    Gates Foundation to help fund TB research...
    :w00t:
    Gates Foundation gives $220 mln for TB research
    15 Mar.`12 - Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates and his wife are to give $220 million over five years to the non-profit biotech firm Aeras to develop vaccines to fight tuberculosis, a company statement said Thursday.
     
  3. waltky

    waltky Well-Known Member

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    Granny makin' sure possum an' Uncle Ferd got B3 in their daily vitamins...
    :grandma:
    Vitamin B3 'helps kill superbugs'
    27 August 2012 - Superbug antibiotic resistance is increasing
     
  4. Panzerkampfwagen

    Panzerkampfwagen New Member

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    But how can superbugs exist? So many people on here have said that evolution doesn't exist!
     
  5. waltky

    waltky Well-Known Member

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    Panzer wrote: But how can superbugs exist? So many people on here have said that evolution doesn't exist!

    Granny says ya is tryin' to be one o' dem smarty-pants...

    ... an' ya must be one o' dem flamin' lib'rals...

    ...shoo! - go away.
    :omfg:
     
  6. waltky

    waltky Well-Known Member

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    Granny says take vitamins dat's got B3 in `em...
    :grandma:
    Studies: Vitamin B3 Boosts Immune System to Kill Superbugs
    September 06, 2012 - New research suggests megadoses of vitamin B3 may be able to help our bodies fight some of the world’s deadliest bacteria or “superbugs.”
     
  7. waltky

    waltky Well-Known Member

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    At the NIH???!!!...
    :omg:
    Superbug kills 7th person at Md. NIH hospital
    15 Spet.`12 — A deadly germ untreatable by most antibiotics has killed a seventh person at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center in Maryland.
    See also:

    NIH superbug claims 7th victim
    September 14,`12 - A deadly, drug-resistant superbug outbreak that began last summer at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center claimed its seventh victim Sept. 7, when a seriously ill boy from Minnesota succumbed to a bloodstream infection, officials said Friday.
     
  8. Richard Powell

    Richard Powell New Member

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    The set of information included in this post is effective and offer different sense of medical science innovations which can help people to live their life in proper manner than before they are living.
     
  9. waltky

    waltky Well-Known Member

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    Making superbugs vulnerable to existing antibiotics...
    :thumbsup:
    Scientists Find New Strategy Against Drug-Resistant Superbugs
    February 07, 2013 - Scientists may have found an effective new weapon against antibiotic-resistant bacteria. They did not create a new drug to kill these microbes; instead, they found a way to interfere with the metabolism of the extra-hardy bacterium - E. coli in this case - so that the germs became more vulnerable to existing antibiotics.
     
  10. waltky

    waltky Well-Known Member

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    Granny says it's dat endtime plague inna Bible - we all gonna die...
    :eekeyes:
    Officials alarmed by increasing superbug reports
    5 Mar.`13 — Health officials say there's been an alarming increase in some dangerous superbugs at U.S. hospitals.
     
  11. waltky

    waltky Well-Known Member

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    Growing superbug threat to hospitals & nursing homes...
    :eekeyes:
    CDC says ‘nightmare bacteria’ a growing threat
    March 5,`13 - Federal officials warned Tuesday that “nightmare bacteria” — including the deadly superbug that struck a National Institutes of Health facility two years ago — are increasingly resistant to even the strongest antibiotics, posing a growing threat to hospitals and nursing homes nationwide.
     
  12. waltky

    waltky Well-Known Member

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    Nursing homes get ready for CRE...
    :confusion:
    Nursing homes brace for the "nightmare bacteria"
    March 11, 2013 - Longterm care facilities are bracing for what federal health officials call a "nightmare" drug-resistant bacteria that kills almost half of those it infects, after officials received a strongly worded advisory last week.
     
  13. waltky

    waltky Well-Known Member

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    The therapy can be injected, sprayed on to the site of infection or swallowed...
    :confusion:
    Phages may be key in bacteria battle
    15 March 2013 - They might look like sinister aliens, but these bacteria-munching viruses could be the next weapon in the fight against infectious diseases.
     
  14. waltky

    waltky Well-Known Member

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    Barrier to superbugs in hospitals...
    :thumbsup:
    Material mimicking shark skin combats hospital superbugs
    Sept. 17, 2014 | A shark skin-like material called Sharklet can be used to combat superbugs in hospitals, according to a new study.
     
  15. waltky

    waltky Well-Known Member

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    Granny says, "Dat's right - we all gonna die o' the plague, just like it says inna Bible...
    :grandma:
    Unchecked superbugs could kill 10 million a year, cost $100 trillion
    11 Dec.`14 - Drug-resistant superbugs could kill an extra 10 million people a year and cost up to $100 trillion (£63.68 trillion) by 2050 if their rampant global spread is not halted, according to a British government-commissioned review.
     
  16. hudson1955

    hudson1955 Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Some advise to those with "bugs" treatable by antibiotics. Unless you are prescribed an antibiotic by your physician, do not take any "left overs" you may have in your "medicine cabinet". Also, it is "extremely" important that you take the antibiotic as directed regardless if you feel better before finishing your prescription/pills.

    This will help ensure that you don't build up a tolerance to the antibiotic. And ensure that antibiotics you need in the future will successfully treat your infection. Antibiotics do not treat a Viral infection, only bacterial infections. This is why they are not prescribed for the flu. So don't treat yourself with "left over" antibiotics you may have in your cabinets.
     
  17. waltky

    waltky Well-Known Member

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    New superbug antibiotic discovered...
    :thumbsup:
    New Antibiotic Offers Hope Against Resistant Bugs
    January 07, 2015 ~ International public health officials have expressed alarm that once highly-effective antibiotics, developed in some cases more than 50 years ago, are losing the war against dangerous infections, allowing once treatable diseases to grow into deadly illnesses worldwide — so-called "superbugs."
     
  18. FreshAir

    FreshAir Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    so God did it... God is responsible for the super-bugs, not evolution....?

    .
     
  19. lynnlynn

    lynnlynn New Member

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    The problem is not just these superbugs, simple ear infections, throat infections, skin infections, etc antibiotics are losing their effectiveness. The future is near when none of the antibiotics will work anymore.
     
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  20. waltky

    waltky Well-Known Member

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    Survival of the fittest applies to germs too...
    [​IMG]
    The threat of 'superbugs' and infections that can't be treated
    October 5, 2017 - “Every time we think we’ve gotten ahead of the bugs, they come back stronger and fitter,” said Ramanan Laxminarayan, director of the Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics & Policy (CDDEP). It is the ability to mutate that has given rise to “superbugs” that resist some — or, increasingly, all — of the antibiotics that were hailed as miracle drugs in the last century, creating one of the biggest threats to global health, food security and development today, according to the World Health Organization.
     
  21. waltky

    waltky Well-Known Member

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    Superbugs are adapting to antibiotics...
    [​IMG]
    Surge In Antibiotics Is A Boon For Superbugs
    March 26, 2018 - Antibiotic Use Is On The Rise, Especially In Low-Income Countries
     

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