Live data from Hacker News

A Novel Way to Fight Drug-Resistant Bacteria

blogs.scientificamerican.com

11–20 of 25 posts

Re: A Novel Way to Fight Drug-Resistant Bacteria

#11
post #8

Can anyone complete the last sentence in this paragraph, I'm very intrigued what its actually attempting to refer to > HDT also aims to balance host reactivity at the site of infection by reducing or preventing an excessive inflammatory response, which can damage internal organs and can even kill. This is achieved through cellular therapy, in which a specific population of bone marrow cells is injected in a host’s bo…

damage.

Re: A Novel Way to Fight Drug-Resistant Bacteria

#12
post #5

It's shocking to me that half of the soap for sale at the grocery store is antibacterial. This should be illegal.

Many things are antibacterial and work fine on your skin, but not in your body. Drinking hydrogen peroxide for example would be at best pointless and at worst harmful.

Re: A Novel Way to Fight Drug-Resistant Bacteria

#13

The human body is truly incredible, and the immune system in particular. Each of us has a custom designed garbage collection system tailored for our bodies. I predict the next big leaps in medicine will come from empowering and leveraging that system to fight everything from infection to cancer.

The body's immune system can attack the body itself though. Cautious approach is needed.

Re: A Novel Way to Fight Drug-Resistant Bacteria

#14
post #12
post #5

It's shocking to me that half of the soap for sale at the grocery store is antibacterial. This should be illegal.

Many things are antibacterial and work fine on your skin, but not in your body. Drinking hydrogen peroxide for example would be at best pointless and at worst harmful.

I think GP isn't trying to say that antibacterial soap should be illegal because it's harmful to humans, but that it should be illegal because it creates resistant bacteria.

Re: A Novel Way to Fight Drug-Resistant Bacteria

#15
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many things are antibacterial and work fine on your skin, but not in your body. Drinking hydrogen peroxide for example would be at best pointless and at worst harmful.

I think GP isn't trying to say that antibacterial soap should be illegal because it's harmful to humans, but that it should be illegal because it creates resistant bacteria.

If it’s not medically useful, I don’t see the benifit of avoidance.

Bleach is a highly effective antibacterial substance, it’s also toxic but that’s not a major problem for floors. Hell, bacteria have had billions of years to adapt to sunlight, it still kills them fairly quickly.

Re: A Novel Way to Fight Drug-Resistant Bacteria

#16
post #5

It's shocking to me that half of the soap for sale at the grocery store is antibacterial. This should be illegal.

It is likely antibacterial by helping you wash off the bacteria better or having chemicals which kill indiscriminately by destroying membranes etc. These aren’t the same as antibiotics, which bacteria can develop resistance for.

Re: A Novel Way to Fight Drug-Resistant Bacteria

#17
post #2

I love this. Previously there was a story about using viruses in order to combat drug resistant bacteria[0]. The more tools we have to kill them off, the better. It's only tangentially related but my feeling is that we've barely scraped what's possible with viral, bacterial and protein engineering though. I can't wait until we start treating them much like we treat transistors and circuits. The building blocks are ev…

Came here to write about this. Phage therapy[0] is an extremely interesting topic and there are a number of startups working in this direction. It's funny, but in Eastern Europe (Georgia, Russia, Poland, etc.) phage therapy is used broadly for many years, whereas US is just catching up. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phage_therapy

People (in the west) have been writing about phage therapy and how revolutionary it will be for 20 years now. It still hasn't arrived.

Phage therapy requires determining which bacteria is causing the disease, then having phages on-hand suitable for that specific bacteria (or some system to culture them). Using the "wrong" phages is useless and there are hundreds of thousands (or even millions) of strains.

Bacteria also evolve phage resistance and phages themselves evolve to target other harmless bacteria in cases where their targets are eradicated.

Phage therapy will probably end up being one component of a multi-prong strategy but it is hardly a replacement for antibiotics.

Re: A Novel Way to Fight Drug-Resistant Bacteria

#20
post #13

The human body is truly incredible, and the immune system in particular. Each of us has a custom designed garbage collection system tailored for our bodies. I predict the next big leaps in medicine will come from empowering and leveraging that system to fight everything from infection to cancer.

The body's immune system can attack the body itself though. Cautious approach is needed.

Agreed, autoimmune diseases are obviously something to be wary of. Not similar to wildfire management, I think we're being foolish if we don't leverage the forces that have powered a natural ecosystem for millennia, instead of trying to replace them.
Post reply on HN