Re: ??

on 7 Feb 2008 22:04:53 -0500, Brock stated:

On Feb 7, 4:31=A0pm, "songbird" <songb...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Allison Turner- wrote:

...

Too true. =A0And I wish people didn't think antibacterial soap was
a good thing in general. =A0The wide prevalence of it just dumps
more antibacterials into the environment, where they get diluted
down to the point that when bacteria encounter them, they (the
bacteria) are likely to develop a resistance to them. =A0Just what
we need. =A0Nature full of bacteria that are resistant to all of
our antibacterials. =A0Feh.

=A0 yes. =A0in the end the arms race in progress will go to the trillions =
of
critters who can mutate faster than we can come up with defenses
against them.

=A0 unfortunately, the worst to take the brunt of whatever outbreak it
will be those with already compromised or weakened immune systems.

=A0 songbird

Riddle me this birdman. How many of your neighbors have died recently
from measles, scarlet fever, smallpox, diphtheria, tetanus, whooping
cough, typhoid, typhus, rubella or have been crippled by polio? Before
you answer this I want you to consider what your answer might have
been 60 years ago in the pre-immunization, pre-antibiotic and pre-
antimicrobial stone ages. All in all I think humans are winning the
microbe wars despite the alarmists of the popular psuedo-medical
press.

Well, all I can say is that the microbiologists doing the actual
research, and probably many of the drug companies looking for new
antimicrobial drugs, do not agree with you. The microbiologists I
talked to who were doing research in Chicago were pretty fucking
alarmed. Yes, we've done *really* amazing things since the pre-
immunization and pre-antibiotic days.

But those antibiotics we've developed over years are going to fail -
only a matter of time - and we aren't finding new ones fast enough
to keep up. Sooner or later, things will break. There are already
strains of Mycobacterium tuberculosis (bacteria causing tuberculosis)
and Staph. aureus (staph infections) that are resistant to *all* of
the drugs we have. There's an entire wing in the pharmacy building
I worked in that is devoted to finding the next M. tuberculosis drug.
Hospitals panic when the resistant Staph. a. is found in a room, and
evacuate everyone and mop the place down with strong bleach.

And where is multi-resistant Staph a. found? In hospitals. Why?
because all of the drugs are being used there, so that's the only
place that multi-resistant strains will evolve. Charming, innit?

A cell in your body (in tissue that's growing quickly) will divide
and become two about once a day. Bacteria divide and become two
every 20 minutes or so... which if you do the math, comes out to
some whopping high number by tomorrow. Actually, given crowding
and imperfect supply of nutrients, etc., you might get only ten
billion bacteria in 24 hours. Now take, say, a mere million of them
and give them some random mutations. Most will die, some will survive,
and a very few of them (it only takes one) in the presence of a weak
amount of drug will survive and thrive, because the mutation it
received happens to make it resistant to the drug). Or take another
hundred or two of the original 10 billion and put them in contact
with some other already-resistant bacteria, who will gladly spit out
a plasmid coding for the resistance (so helpful and sharing a
community, bacteria are). It isn't very long before that one
bacterium you had yesterday has produced progeny that are resistant
to whatever you might hand them.

Antibacterials only work because we swamp the bacteria with them -
killing them before they have a chance to develop resistance. But
if you blithely pour those antibacterials down the drain, where
they can get diluted to the point where bacteria can encounter them
and survive, and evolve resistance - well, it's all very bad juju.
For us, anyway. The bacteria go right along partying.


-Allison
non-flaky hat today.


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