161–170 of 414 posts
The interviewed expert has very good credentials and clinical experience to be talking about what he is talking about, and his warnings should be taken seriously. But even at that, the fallacious teleological language he uses about biological evolution by natural selection suggests a way out of this problem. When he says, "Bacteria, like any living organism, want to survive," and "So anything that we do to try and ki…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In Denmark, they prevent infections in chicken houses by thoroughly cleaning them, then using techniques developed for clean rooms to prevent infections. In the US, we let them wade in their own filth and pump them full of antibiotics. We should just make it flat out illegal to use antibiotics across entire herds of livestock. We should also fine doctors for prescribing antibiotics to patients with a viral infection…
>We [sic] should just make it flat out illegal to... >We [sic] should also fine doctors for... Why is violence an appropriate response to these non-violent issues?
I, for one, think we should pass laws that prevent people from doing harmful things to society..
The interviewed expert has very good credentials and clinical experience to be talking about what he is talking about, and his warnings should be taken seriously. But even at that, the fallacious teleological language he uses about biological evolution by natural selection suggests a way out of this problem. When he says, "Bacteria, like any living organism, want to survive," and "So anything that we do to try and ki…
We're giving bacteria (which reproduce rapidly and mutate quickly) the perfect natural science lab to mutate and select for antibiotic resistance. There are 10^14 bacterial cells in the human body vs only 10^13 human cells [1]. Their reproductive cycle is over one million times faster than ours.
We're creating the perfect conditions for rapid evolution of these organisms. This system is executed by billions of billions of bacteria continuously and we're trying to combat that evolution with a few thousand humans in labs.
It seems to me that the take-away here is we need better engineering of our own solutions and we need to find a way stop enabling this rapid evolution of bacteria.
The anthropomorphism of bacterial evolution makes the article hard to follow for the layman (me). Can someone familiar with bacterial evolution please explain to me how the use of antibiotics leads to superbugs? I am clearly misunderstanding something. I was under the impression that in a population of bacteria, genes express themselves in any number of random ways. If we expose the bacterial culture to antibiotics,…
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Clearly, everyone needs to stop washing their hands, or bacteria will develop soap immunity. And then what will we do?
Killing bacteria is easy. The trick is killing bacteria without harming ourselves. Soaps can be massively more "brutal" in terms of the mechanisms that destroy bacteria than what antibiotics can, and so the evolutionary steps that would have to occur for resistance are vastly larger, and would mean changing them in many different directions. E.g. it does not help if a bacteria can survive a soap if it is still physic…
(http://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/7/2/70-0225_article.htm)
> Skin hygiene, particularly of the hands, is a primary mechanism for reducing contact and fecal-oral transmission of infectious agents. Widespread use of antimicrobial products has prompted concern about emergence of resistance to antiseptics and damage to the skin barrier associated with frequent washing. This article reviews evidence for the relationship between skin hygiene and infection, the effects of washing on skin integrity, and recommendations for skin care practices.
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In Denmark, they prevent infections in chicken houses by thoroughly cleaning them, then using techniques developed for clean rooms to prevent infections. In the US, we let them wade in their own filth and pump them full of antibiotics. We should just make it flat out illegal to use antibiotics across entire herds of livestock. We should also fine doctors for prescribing antibiotics to patients with a viral infection…
>We [sic] should just make it flat out illegal to... >We [sic] should also fine doctors for... Why is violence an appropriate response to these non-violent issues?
If people who abuse antibiotics will lead to us having no good antibiotics, then they will inflict extreme violence on the entire human race.
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Of those, though, two of the threats were real and mitigated before the impact could be realized (nuclear war and Y2K), and one of them is a fairly recent scientific theory that is still trying to be understood (climate change).
In the 80s we acted faster on freon/CFCs than we have on climate change in the ensuing 30 years, with less danger to human life and less evidence. The only thing that's new about climate change as a scientific theory is the annual increase in the pile of evidence that it's happening and we're the cause of it.
The interviewed expert has very good credentials and clinical experience to be talking about what he is talking about, and his warnings should be taken seriously. But even at that, the fallacious teleological language he uses about biological evolution by natural selection suggests a way out of this problem. When he says, "Bacteria, like any living organism, want to survive," and "So anything that we do to try and ki…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Clearly, everyone needs to stop washing their hands, or bacteria will develop soap immunity. And then what will we do?
You've been voted down but there is actually a school of thought that excess use of antibacterials and generally going "overboard" (whatever that means exactly) with preventing children from being exposed to natural flora can potentially result in weakened immune systems. There's a lot of pseudo-science in these claims but that doesn't mean there's absolutely no truth to them. It would probably be hard to do a study…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Now we have no weapons; we're helpless and the world is again going to be a scary place where a cut or a scrape can land you in a hospital or in a mortuary. Perhaps most terrifying is that the mere act of hospitalization will likely be the highest vector of transmission of nearly untreatable infections. Go in for a routine procedure and end up in the isolation ward due to some highly infectious, deadly disease.
This is what I don't completely understand. Why has no one developed a disinfectant spray that hospitals can apply ad-nauseum (pun intended, the smell ideally wouldn't make people nauseous) all over the hospital? Or, do I not understand the vectors properly? The way I perceive these stories is that hospitals are actually extremely dirty on a microbial level (as is most of the world), it's just counter-intuitive becau…
We have robots that do that now.
http://loyolamedicine.org/newswire/news/uv-light-robots-kill...