DailyDirt: Fighting Off Infections In The Future

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

If you haven't heard about MSRA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) yet, it's a strain of bacteria that can't be killed by common antibiotic drugs. Antibiotic drugs have been over-used or mis-used in various situations, and bacteria are evolving resistance to the drugs we've been using for decades. Without antibiotics, healthcare would be thrust back into the dark ages. No surgeries could be done safely without antibiotics. Very common infections might kill off people regularly, instead of being the mild inconvenience that they are today. Check out these links for more info on superbugs and how we can deal with them. If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.
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Filed Under: anti-quorum sensing compounds, antibacterial, antibiotics, antimicrobial, bacteriocins, bacteriophages, crispr, drugs, medicine, msra, superbugs, teixobactin, topic-qx


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  • icon
    Mason Wheeler (profile), 15 Jan 2015 @ 5:08pm

    Antibiotics are tricky stuff. Killing bacteria is actually surprisingly easy. There are any number of ways to kill every harmful bacterium in your body, guaranteed. Jumping into an incinerator, for example. This simple (if absurd) example should intuitively explain the difficulty with developing effective antibiotics.

    Bacteria are living creatures, which means that antibiotics, when you get down to it, are poisons. It's very difficult to come up with a poison that kills bacteria but doesn't harm humans. It's even harder to come up with a poison that kills harmful bacteria while minimizing the damage to your internal ecosystem of "gut fauna" and other helpful microbes that exist in symbiosis with you...

    link to this | view in chronology ]

    • identicon
      Anonymous Coward, 15 Jan 2015 @ 5:52pm

      Re:

      The problem is that a bacteria that maybe harmless and even beneficial to a healthy person in moderate amounts may grow out of control in a sick person with a compromised immune system.

      link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 15 Jan 2015 @ 5:50pm

    The problem is that sick people in hospitals tend to have much weaker immune systems than healthy people and so bacteria that are relatively harmless to healthy people and often live inside us unnoticed start to become a problem to people as they become sick and weak. Those bacteria are still not much of a threat to a healthy person.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • icon
    ChurchHatesTucker (profile), 15 Jan 2015 @ 6:58pm

    Finally

    ...like teixobactin which was found in soil-dwelling bacteria …

    DailyDirt lives up to its name at last.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • icon
    cypherspace (profile), 15 Jan 2015 @ 7:11pm

    I hope that this antibioic - or the process to extract it - isn't locked up behind patents when we need it most.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • icon
    steell (profile), 16 Jan 2015 @ 6:02am

    Just use ultraviolet light to kill MRSA, works better with less harm to the patient. First hand experience, while going through chemo for Hodgkin's Lymphoma (killed my immune system every two weeks), I developed a MRSA infection in both lower legs. After all other antibiotics failed I was admitted to the hospital for a every 12 hour, seven day course in intravenous antibiotics. At the end of the seven days the MRSA infection was reported to be cured and I was cleared to go home. Three days later the pus was oozing out of the open hole in my leg and the MRSA returned.

    I did research and re-discovered ultraviolet light killed bacteria. Ultraviolet light fixtures were sold for the purpose of killing bacteria until the FDA stopped the practice by declaring them medical devices that must be certified by the FDA around 1950 or so. I found one that was originally sold by Sears in the late 1940s for sale on eBay and bought it. 40 minutes on each leg, three times a day, for five days, and the MRSA infection was gone.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

    • identicon
      Anonymous Coward, 17 Jan 2015 @ 12:55am

      Re:

      The FDA is a corrupt organization that has no intent of helping you out. The sad part is that most people don't realize this.

      link to this | view in chronology ]

  • icon
    Pronounce (profile), 16 Jan 2015 @ 2:47pm

    Adaptation or Evolution

    If people (scientist included) want to be straight and honest with their beliefs about life and existence we should just admit that bacteria can never be eradicated. For, unlike the dodo and other extinct species, bacterium to be eradicated we'd have to come up with a way for bacteria hosts to not be bacteria hosts. Everyone who is reasonable and sensible let's just admit this and move on.

    I up-voted Mason Wheeler's comment, because human existence is 10% you and 90% other. We live in a symbiotic relationship with germs and other items that have their own DNA/RNA.

    I'd like to take off on a tangent at this point to address the West's view of death and dying, but no. I'll just offer my opinion that we've built a life that is like a castle of sand and are blaming everything but ourselves when it crumbles into dust.

    link to this | view in chronology ]


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