WHO Issues a List of 12 Most Worrying Drug-Resistant Bacteria (medicalxpress.com) 91
Artem Tashkinov quotes a report from Medical Xpress: The World Health Organization has issued a list of the top dozen bacteria most dangerous to humans, warning that doctors are fast running out of treatment options. WHO said the most-needed drugs are for germs that threaten hospitals, nursing homes and among patients who need ventilators or catheters. The agency said the dozen listed resistant bacteria are increasingly untreatable and can cause fatal infections; most typically strike people with weakened immune systems. At the top of WHO's list is Acinetobacter baumannii, a group of bacteria that cause a range of diseases from pneumonia to blood or wound infections. In recent years, health officials have detected a few patients resistant to colistin, the antibiotic of last resort. So far, doctors have been able to treat them with other drugs. But experts worry that the colistin-resistant bacteria will spread their properties to other bacteria already resistant to more commonly used antibiotics, creating germs that can't be killed by any known drugs.
Bacteria that worries (Score:1)
Re:Bacteria that worries (Score:5, Informative)
Copper kills bacteria, including the antibiotic-resistant ones, everybody knows that, except apparently the hospital staffs.
Silver also, but that might be a bit too expensive.
Dead bacteria can not be transferred to other people...
Brass is likely more practical. (Score:3)
It's just as toxic [wikipedia.org], and it has better corrosion resistance.
Note to hospitals: the oligodynamic effect is your friend - please start relying upon it!
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Re: Bacteria that worries (Score:1)
Re: Bacteria that worries (Score:2)
Re:23,000 Die from Bacteria 250k Die from Malpract (Score:5, Insightful)
A properly administered free-market system that allows insurers to cross state lines and removes a lot of the useless regulatory BS that makes practitioners hesitant to treat people will save tens, possibly hundreds of thousands of people who will otherwise die thanks to the Obamacare act.
Bullshit. Pure, unmitigated bullshit. America has the most expensive healthcare system in the world. Here's a clue for the clueless: it's not because of government regulation, and it was the most expensive in the world (and one of the worst) even before Obama was elected. The "socialist" healthcare systems of Europe are both cheaper and also better. Yeah, libertarianism works great --when you've never been outside your basement.
Here's what laissez-faire capitalist healthcare really looks like: the health care conglomerates soak sick people for all they can take, because sick people don't have the resources to bargain. Then, when they run out of money, you let them die. For the conglomerates, it's like a money spigot.
For the sick people, of course, it's a death trap with the added feature that it bankrupts you, too.
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For the sick people, of course, it's a death trap...
And if you're not sick already, then beware!
Official marketing target of the pharmaceutical companies: Each person on earth 2 medications daily.
And they're not so ethical as to shun away from committing hidden crimes against humanity to reach that goal.
Re: 23,000 Die from Bacteria 250k Die from Malprac (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm a Brit (on disability welfare myself actually), and I'm pretty sure I'd be dead without socialised healthcare. Which, also, has fuck all to do with the quality of healthcare available. If you want shorter waiting times for non-critical conditions (the ones that require something fancy like major surgery but that you can easily survive a few months or so waiting for), doctors more willing to try very expensive and not very successful treatments etc, nothing stops you from having private health insurance and seeing private doctors, if you can afford it. The only difference is that if you can't afford it, you still have access to free, high quality healthcare. I've never understood this argument - it's not like having socialised healthcare makes private healthcare illegal.
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Spot on. I'm a Brit too and would be quite happy spending my whole life paying into the NHS without ever having to use it.
The American system where you can get hit with a disease, or have an accident, and then die because you can't afford the treatment is barbaric and medieval.
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"America has the most expensive healthcare system in the world" ..."
"Yeah, libertarianism works great
Libertarianism? In the USA healthcare system? LMFAO.
Where exactly do Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare, bans on free trade of prescription drugs and the tons of other government regulations fit into your definition of "libertarianism"?
In 2016, the federal government spent over $900 BILLION on Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare subsidies and other socialized healthcare programs. Due to federal government regulation,
Re: 23,000 Die from Bacteria 250k Die from Malprac (Score:2)
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And all Obamacare did was put a band-aid over it. Instead of addressing the real issues, like why medicines, surgeries, and hospitals are so damn expensive, and why malpractice is (ostensibly) rampant, it just shifted how the costs are paid. For some people, it was a boon, for others, it made their situation worse. It was rushed into law without proper debate and revision.
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Off-topic!
Re: 23,000 Die from Bacteria 250k Die from Malprac (Score:2)
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The state of Washington is even more communist than California. It approaches European level.
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If they kill bacteria with antibiotics, yes. If they kill bacteria with alcohol (which is usually the case), then no, they are not bad and will not breed super-bacteria.
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They felt that the income from a justifiable extra day in the hospital combined with not having the consequences of ineffective antibiotics was to their benefit.
Actual List (Score:5, Informative)
Since the linked article is still a few clicks away from the actual list, which is then a PDF, here is the actual list:
Priority 1: CRITICAL
Acinetobacter baumannii, carbapenem-resistant
Pseudomonas aeruginosa, carbapenem-resistant
Enterobacteriaceae, carbapenem-resistant, 3rd generation cephalosporin-resistant
Priority 2: HIGH
Enterococcus faecium, vancomycin-resistant
Staphylococcus aureus, methicillin-resistant, vancomycin intermediate and resistant
Helicobacter pylori, clarithromycin-resistant
Campylobacter, fluoroquinolone-resistant
Salmonella spp., fluoroquinolone-resistant
Neisseria gonorrhoeae, 3rd generation cephalosporin-resistant, fluoroquinolone-resistant
Priority 3: MEDIUM
Streptococcus pneumoniae, penicillin-non-susceptible
Haemophilus influenzae, ampicillin-resistant
Shigella spp., fluoroquinolone-resistant
Source: http://www.who.int/medicines/p... [who.int]
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This seems like one of those of cases where linking to the source really doesn't benefit the discussion.
Sometimes abstracting helps understanding rather thanhindering it.
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I've actually had a couple of those. The Pseudomonas aeruginosa was treated successfully by levofloxcillin (sp?), and I went from insufficient blood pressure to keep my eyes functioning properly to feeling great in 10 days. The Staphylococcus aureus was treated with clindomycin (sp?), which works great, in addition to giving my intestines inspiration to try new and innovative things to do something I had already thought worked satisfactorily. So far, so good.
Re: The poor in the US get ObamaCare... (Score:1)
Welcome to healthcare as practiced in civilised countries. It's probably quite a shock.
Meta-comment: stating uncomfortable truths != trolling.
But iodine is restricted due to the drug war. (Score:2)
It is common knowledge that [iodine] was used widely in hospitals for decades, and supposedly(?) resistance is not built up to it.
But iodine, and most iodine-containing medical preparations, are heavily restricted, due to the drug war.
Seems they're used in one step of turning pseudephedrine into meth. So, though they're not actually BANNED, the drug warriors put so much red tape on them that most chain-store drug stores just dropped them as unprofitable.
(I found this out when the fallout from Fukishima was
Walgreens lists it as in stock (Score:2)
> If anybody knows of a chain store in California or Nevada where I can buy potassium iodide supplements or tincture of iodine, over the counter, please let me know.
The very first place I tried was Walgreens. You didn't say what part of California, so at random I checked availability in San Francisco. Here's one brand:
https://www.walgreens.com/stor... [walgreens.com]
Of course Amazon will deliver it right to your door.
Your difficulty finding it may indeed have something to do with illegal drugs. Not quite in the way yo
Disabling advertising on Slashdot (Score:1)
A long time slashdot user, I have been offered the opportunity to disable ads in the sidebar on the classic.slashdot.org main page, but wanting to support the site I never disabled it.
Recently however there have been annoying ads that stay "stickied" on top even when you scroll down and it has been driving me nuts, so finally I decided to use the option. Except it has disappeared! What happened? Does the option only appear under certain circumstances? Did the new overlords remove it and I simply missed my c
So-called "drug-resistant bacteria" (Score:4, Funny)
The president says he's going to get us out of WHO, so problem solved.
So what's the answer? (Score:1)
Maybe genetically engineering a meta-virus which will modify those in the wild?
WTF ads over whole screen??? (Score:1)
Hi I've never flamed on Slashdot but about 60% of my browser screen is ads. The top 40% and the right 20%. This is intolerable, so even though my "karma" is excellent and my signup number is low seven figures, I'm outtahere.
Time to restart using antisera. (Score:3)
Before antibiotics one could get an antiserum against each of many nasty infections. The rise of antibiotics displaced these drugs - even for some things (such as some forms of meningitis) where an antiserum against the particular organism, did a better job.
This actually made some sense. Antibiotics were broader spectrum, so (even after drug resistant bugs became common) you were likely to find one that worked in time to save the patient. Antisera, on the other hand, were very bug-specific.
If multiple drug resistance makes antibiotics nearly useless, perhaps it's time to revive antiserum use.
We now have the technology to rapidly identify the target organism(s) in a disease process, so we can rapidly select the correct magic bullets. And we also have the technology to make specific antisera by the bucketful.
And without the side-effects of making it by exposing an animal (like a "serum horse") to a pathogen and then (once it's developed an immunity) extracting the (horse-type) antibodies to this - and to everything else its immune system doesn't like - to make the drug. Instead we can make human monoclonal antibodies to just one target.
We can also engineer an immunization by chopping out the DNA for some conserved region snippet of some pathogen's accessible surface markers, splicing it with neighboring coding that will make the immune system take note and building it into an otherwise (and still) harmless bug - either to make an active ingredient for an immunization cocktail or a variola/polio style live-virus challenge. The bug has a very hard time evolving resistance because a conserved region of some component of its molecular machinery is usually conserved because has to be the way it is for it to work.
This is already being done to some extent. Seems to me it's time to stop crying about the end of antibiotics and focus on this set of approaches - which should be very lasting.
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Maybe. But that just begs the question, that a layman would ask: How is antiserum different from vaccination?
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How is antiserum different from vaccination?
Four things:
- Immunization
- Innoculation
- Vaccination
- Antiserum
An immunization is a challenge to the immune system that looks to it like the target pathogen - often with an adjuvant to do enough minor mischief to convince the immune system that this is a really bad guy that needs a SWAT team response. It might be made out of:
- pieces of killed pathogen,
- pieces of killed related pathogen,
- engineered molecu
We did it! (Score:2)
Despite all the pesky warning and regulations preventing this very situation, we managed to get around all of it and create the most dangerous bacteria that human-kind has ever seen! Everyone, give yourselves a pat on the back because we earned this. I hope you all got biohazard suits so you can safely watch humanity get ravaged by our new little "friends"! ;)
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If the bacteria are outside of a person, bleach does an excellent job of killing them.
If a person with bacteria takes bleach, it does an excellent job of killing them.
Targeted Alpha Therapy offers a solution (Score:3, Informative)
For some time, Targeted alpha therapy [wikipedia.org] has shown promise for treating difficult cancers, but it may also be used to kill antibiotic-resistant bacteria and pathogens like HIV. Once this capability is developed, the antibiotic arms race will end once and for all. The looming threat is very serious, and such promising research should be a high priority.
Unfortunately, there are artificial barriers that are retarding progress. The most attractive isotopes for use with TAT are Actinium-225 and Bismuth-213, which no longer exist in nature. Looking at the periodic table, one might be inclined to believe that other substitutes exist, but they simply don’t. The neptunium decay chain [wikipedia.org] is unique in that it does not pass through radon or terminate in lead. Born in supernovae long ago, it was extinct in nature until relatively recently, when it was revived in the heart of nuclear reactors.
However, conventional reactors don’t produce much, and it is impractical to extract the short-lived isotopes from solid fuel rods sealed in a reactor core. Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors however, are the ideal machines for producing these life-saving medical isotopes. Meanwhile, LFTR safely transforms nuclear waste into abundant and inexpensive energy. [thmsr.nl]
It is worth noting that Flibe Energy [flibe-energy.com] is the only company in the west pursuing this technology; others developing molten salt reactors are trying to take shortcuts which miss out on the greatest benefits of the thorium fuel cycle. LFTR is a comprehensive solution, which can finally close the fuel cycle, eliminating the need for uranium mining and enrichment. It is a more challenging design, but it doesn’t kick the can down the road; it fully addresses all rational concerns with nuclear technology, and offers many new opportunities.
Moderated Troll, really? (Score:2)
Someone can't accept new nuclear, even to save their own life. Chances are very good that you or someone close to you will die from cancer someday, which could have been preventable if ideology didn't blind you. If the fools in government weren't more interested in weapons than energy, this technology would be saving countless lives today, and inexpensive carbon-free energy would be the norm. There is a good article detailing the specifics and history of LFTR [businessinsider.com] for those with a mind open to facts.
The crusad
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How do you apply the radioactives to the bacteria without irradiating the patient?
And yet still used as cattle feed (Score:3)
I remember a discussion about that here on
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Even if you could find them discussions are archived so it wouldn't allow you to reply.
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The drugs used by livestock feeders aren't the same ones that worry WHO.
You're spreading fud; these antibiotic resistant bacteria are caused by inappropriate use of antibiotics to treat humans, mostly (but not entirely) in Third World countries.
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Any drug formerly effective against any of the bacteria on their list worry the WHO by no longer being effective. Just because they mention only one of the best broad spectrum anti-biotics which they are resistant against doesn't mean those drugs are the only relevant ones. Since someone mentioned colistin was used on animals I did a quick google, Salmonella is on the list and colistin resistance is spreading. By complete coincidence it's used in agriculture for Salmonella infections.
Even more so though, th
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but, uneducated opinion here, wouldn't any hint of antibiotic slightly related to the pathogen strengthen any bacteria against it?
you know, that whole theory of "whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger?"... or does that not apply to the microbiology world?
In the microbiology world, whatever doesn't kill you, but weakens or kills your competitors, makes your progeny (and your resistance) more prevalent. So in the metagenetic sense it makes your germ-line stronger, but it doesn't do much for you specifically (except get rid of your competition).
Asian Seafood and antibiotics (Score:1)
Bloomberg Businessweek a few months ago did an article based on research that found use of heavy duty antibiotics in seafood (mostly shrimp) farming in China. Drugs like colistin are being used. The article talked about how waste from pig farming is somehow used to feed the farmed shrimp. Improting "food" like this into the States is obviously illegal. To add insult to injury, there are shell companies in China, Thailand, etc. set up for the sole purpose of circumventing those legal controls, and the shrimp
Why dont they get rid of BUILDING??? (Score:1)