New Superbug Weapon to Replace Failing Antibiotics 201
An anonymous reader writes "Researchers in British Columbia have identified a peptide that can fight infection by boosting the immune system. Because antibiotics are under threat due to an explosion of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, this may be just in time."
Frosting (Score:5, Funny)
I hope not (Score:5, Funny)
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Dude... if you're hoping to fight bacteria that's large enough to attack with a shotgun, I don't think this treatment is any threat to those dreams.
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Re:I hope not (Score:5, Funny)
The zombies created by the superbug, of course, silly.
Quick. (Score:5, Funny)
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Close, that's another project....
I didn't know we were allowed to talk about the peptide publicly yet. I guess the cat is out.
I've been working on the bioinformatics side of this project for over four years now, and it was very exciting when Bob and the guys in the lab made this discovery.
This really is a great new solution, prevent infection before it takes hold. Make the innate immune system stronger. Since no new classes of drugs have been developed for what, a d
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Rehashing existing drugs isn't likely to be very effective when it comes to resistant bacteria. It would only take a small evolutionary change in the bacteria population to negate the effectivness of newer drugs.
Since
Source? (Score:5, Insightful)
More snake oil (Score:5, Informative)
This is a very speculative and pretty dodgy article. Firstly, it's not a new concept (being healthy is the best tool for stopping infection before it starts, and, secondary to this, immunization, sanitation and quarantine).
Secondly, drugs already exist which are used in severe sepsis to boost the immune system. These drugs are very dangerous and expensive and when used inappropriately cause as many deaths as they save lives.
While it is true that antibiotic use is excessive, the situation we have is that the people who are getting the MRSA and VRE and other 'superbug' infections are frequently already immune compromised and, in whole body infection, invariably die without antibiotics - nothing else is proven to work without them.
Also, it's a peptide. You can't take it as a tablet - it's not going to be on the shelves of your supermarket - and if it is, better off eating a hard boiled egg! If anything, it will be a small scale intravenous drug for use in intensive care units, usually when all else fails, just like all these other 'breakthrough' solutions.
Re:More snake oil (Score:4, Informative)
Here's the press release [publicaffairs.ubc.ca] from UBC, and a SCIAM article. [sciam.com]
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I wonder if Eric is actually an estute /.er
Re: Source? (Score:2)
Over-prescribed (Score:5, Insightful)
Sniffles? Take an antibiotic.
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Simple fix for this problem (Score:5, Funny)
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For those patients who expect a little more, there's always Levoplaceboxacin, Vancoplacebomycin (which can turn you red, too!) and Placebozolid.
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The #1 problem for Doctors is:
1. patient takes meds
2. patient starts to feel better
3. patient stops
Patients who do not finish their course of medication, do not kill all the bacteria.
Maybe if people were compliant with Doctors' orders you wouldn't have resistant strains cropping up.
It's easy to blame the doctors, try looking beyond that.
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In the short-term, we can slow the det
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Yea... that's what I said
I fail to see how you got to this conclusion.
You went from step 1 to profit without filling in the question marks.
What exactly are the "demands of their patients" and what does it have to do with patient non-complaince?
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I fail to see how you got to this conclusion.
It's just an observation: patients pay the bills, patients want quick fixes, patients demand the treatments they see on TV -- but the power to make decisions about what's best for the population rests in the hands of doctors. My contention is that doctors are the enablers of this over-prescription epidemic, so I place responsibility squarely on the medical establishment rather than patients themselves.
you attribute it to overperscription of antibiotics. To counter that assertion, consider that drug resistant strains of HIV are showing up. Are you going to argue that HIV retro-virals are being overperscribed?
Though there are significant differences between bacteria and viruses such as HIV, current thinking is th
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Maybe if people were compliant with Doctors' orders you wouldn't have resistant strains cropping up.
It's easy to blame the doctors, try looking beyond that.
Agreed, but from a different angle.
What does it say about the application of "modern" medicine (or more to the point, the pharmaceutical industry) when millions of people have stopped taking their medications prematurely since the antibiotic was commercialized?
Surely ther
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1. patient takes meds
2. patient starts to feel better
3. patient stops
Patients who do not finish their course of medication, do not kill all the bacteria.
Dispite just about any drug perscription in the last 30 or so years coming with instructions to finish the treatment. One real problem with antibiotics is that just taking them is likely to make people feel ill. Because they also wind up altering the bacterial population of the gut.
Re:Over-prescribed (Score:5, Insightful)
It doesn't work that way. When you're infected, some of the bacteria have more resistance than others -- resistance is a fairly complicated trait; it's not binary. So if you stop "as soon as you feel better," what this means is that you've killed off just enough of the least resistant bacteria so that you don't notice the symptoms of infection any more; there are still plenty of somewhat-more-but-not-completely resistant bacteria in your body, and you've created a massive selective pressure favoring those strains. Whereas if you finish the prescribed course of antibiotics, you're wiping out all but the very most resistant -- and that's likely to be a fairly small number, which your immune system can indeed deal with on its own, now that most of the bacteria overall are out of they way.
I hate to bring up such a politically charged analogy, but this is the best way I can think of to explain it: suppose you're planning to invade a country and eliminate all resistance. You have two courses of action available:
(a) Attack, keep attacking, kill anyone who resists, and even after visible resistance has ceased, keep aggressively patrolling every square foot of the country until well after you're sure that everyone who might oppose your rule is dead.
(b) Attack, kill off the most visible opponents, ease up until a rebellion starts, kill a few more people until things quiet down, ease up until a rebellion starts, kill a few more people
Which option do you think is likely to be most effective? Conversely, which one do you think is most likely to produce a hardened and pretty much ineradicable resistance? Hint: (b) is pretty much what people who stop taking antibiotics as soon as they feel better are doing.
Of course, my analogy should only be interpreted in medical terms. Doesn't have anything to do with anything else that's going on in the world. Uh-uh. Not a bit. No sirree.
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Once those bacteria start listening to Britney Spears, waving their purple stained pseudopods in the plasma and embrace dem
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Actually not, the mechanisms of antibiotic resistance do not always grant immunity in an all or nothing fashion depending upon the type of immunity that the bacterium develop so it is better to use ALL of the prescribed medication so that even partially resistant bacteria are still killed and all
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Patients are a terrible judge of when an infection has actually been cleared or under control by their immune systems so it is also best not to leave anything up to chance.
I know, and I knew my original post was stupid as soon as I pushed the submit button, doh!
The doctors should be able to have the pharmacies call them to check whether they should give the patient the real drug or just a placebo.
Unfortunately that approach is now considered unethical, although it was common practice to give people placebo medication in the distant past. Doctors do need to regain some of the authority they once had, but creeping individualism has put a stop to that idea.
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Ok, just kidding about that. Seriously, it depends on the doctor- mine is great!
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Clearly you have no idea how this process works. You have merely transformed an infection into a subclinical infection. You haven't killed all the bacteria by any means. You've just killed the most vulnerable ones - enough to allow what was bothering you - the swollen tissue, massive release of histamine, bradykinin, etc that was causing you pain.
Oh you feel better - but bacteria are sti
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Take two and call me in the morning.
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They might be better off prescribing placebos or even pills with instructions to be swallowed with at least a certain quantity of water.
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It's actually worst than that. Antibiotics are also pumped into perfectly healthy animals reared for food. Plenty of bacteria parasites arn't that fussy about their hosts.
Waaa, Doctor Help Me (Score:2)
Let your body fight off problems on its own. Only go for help when it's really life-threatening. Your "busy" life can wait a few days while you get better.
Re:Waaa, Doctor Help Me (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, there has never ever ever ever been any causal link between antibiotic prescriptions for personal, in-home use and the development of antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria. Given the number of studies by people trying to scare people away from antibioitics, it is likely that such a link simply does not exist, as it would likely have been found by now if it did.
Antibiotic resistance develops as a direct result of hospital use of antibiotics. Unfortunately, hospital use usually equates with life-threatening. The reason that resistant strains take hold in hospitals is that you have a higher concentration of sick people breathing the same air, using some of the same shared facilities, etc. with doctors and nurses moving from patient to patient. As much as they try to minimize the spread of illness among patients, it still occurs, and unlike in your home, the people in the hospital are often already sick or in poor health, and are thus more susceptible to bacteria that (barely) survived a round of antibiotics.
By contrast, letting yourself "wait a few days while you get better" from bacterial infections has been linked to numerous diseases, including several varieties of arthritis, rheumatic fever, Pelvic Inflammatory Disease, and even heart damage. Waiting it out is absolutely the worst thing you can do.
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Re:Waaa, Doctor Help Me (Score:5, Insightful)
Now we have keyboards, remote controls, and all kinds of stuff that can't be cleaned. She died from an infection carried by improperly sterilized diagnostic equipment.
Today, hospital care seems to be more about pushing pills and foregoing the basics so it's no wonder we have resistant bugs.
Re:Waaa, Doctor Help Me (Score:4, Interesting)
Funny, these guys [cdc.gov] seem to disagree with you. Specifically: "Clinical misuse of antibiotics may be more common among private practitioners than among public health personnel--private practitioners charge higher fees, the demand for antibiotics seen in private patients is higher, and more drugs are available in private clinics than in public hospitals "
Oh look, so do these guys [cdc.gov]. My search returned over 100 hits and it's really not my job to educate you, so I won't go on. But there IS a causal link. Ask any infectious disease specialist and s/he will cite a lot more articles for you.
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Those particular studies are pretty easy to discount. Developing countries != modern society, and the other one did not come to the conclusion you suggest. It showed a number of factors that lead to the difference, the most critical of which was the spread of resistant bacteria among infants in day care. Unless I missed something, it did NOT claim a causal relationship between higher prescription of antibiotics and greater frequency of antibiotic resistance, and indeed, at one point in the paper actually
Re:Waaa, Doctor Help Me (Score:4, Insightful)
First wrong statement: Overprescription of antibiotics for (presumably viral) ear infections has been strongly linked to various strains of drug resistant streptoocci and staphylococci.
This paragraph is an interesting mix of logic, illogic and just incorrect statements. While there are certainly strains of bacteria whose resistance is linked to hospital use of antibiotics, it is no where near correct to state that this is a totality or even a majority of cases. Bacteria aren't terribly bright, just persistent. Stick some antibiotics in their culture medium, wherever it happens to be, and somebody's bound to come out alive. It's just selection pressure in action. In the hospital, in the home, in the cattle yard.
Just what the hell are you talking about? While there are diseases that are due to an immune response set up by a bacterial infection, for example, rheumatic heart fever from streptococcal sore throat (and there are several others), I don't think you will find any evidence to support your claim that stomping out every bacterial infection the instant it starts (and you know this just how?) will help you in any way. In fact, for strep throat, it is quite clear that you have ten entire days after the onset of symptoms to start antibiotics in order to prevent rheumatic heart fever. While there are some interesting hints that some chronic diseases, such as atherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries) is linked to chronic low grade bacterial infections, the current longitudinal studies where they have given people antibiotics for several years on a regular basis have failed to show any real decrease in heart disease. There are a number of flaws in these studies, the most striking is that they have been too short (one or two years) but my point is that simply taking antibiotics at the first instant of an infection (and again, how to you know this??) doesn't seem to help the immune system modulated damage. It's way harder than that.
And for all of the rest of you folks. The living organism isn't just a petri dish, the immune system modulates and in fact is responsible for most of the clearance of bacterial infections. You don't have to kill every damned little microorganism, in fact, if you do you tend to create other problems. You just have to let the immune system get an upper hand. It's a very complicated problem. Anybody here taken a good, hard look at what we know about the immune system lately? Your head will asplode. We don't know nearly as much as we need to in order to deal with the complex problem of bacterial
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Fixed that for you. Remember, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. I'm not saying that you're wrong (I don't have the data to do that), just pointing out that you're making something of a leap in your conclusion.
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And yet, "waiting it out works" for most viruses. Do we want people in the ER every time they get "the sniffles", or just "feel bad"? If not, how to we propose to teach the general populace to accurately diagno
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Hey hang on a second, I earn a living from those sniffles!!!
You cut the number of patients I see per day, and I'm going to have to put my rates up. You don't mind $500 a consult do you?
I agree that antibiotics are overprescribed by many doctors. But please DO visit your doctor if you don't feel well!!!
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I don't know of anyone in the past 30 years who had antibiotics given to them by a licensed physician for a viral infection as you're suggesting. Maybe I live in a different part of the world than you.
In evolutionary terms, it seems inevitable that the use of antibiotics on a widespread basis will cause resistant germs to evolve. By cutting down the use of antibiotics, we're buying more time to com
Immunology (Score:5, Informative)
The human body has seven systems: muscoskeletal, reproductive, skin, cardiopulmonary, nervous, digestive, and immune. Many of the ailments which people experience--cancer, diabetes, neurodegenerative disorders, prion diseases, leukemia, infections--invade tissues of the six other systems but are ultimately traceable as a deficiency in their own immune system. The immune system is trained as the maintenance arm of the body. When cells become cancerous the immune system is trained to find and remove them. When viruses and bacteria enter the body the immune system is trained to kill them. When plaques build up in the body the immune system is trained to remove them. When cells are starving, or asphyxiated, or agitated it is the immune system which is responsible for transmitting the proper signals systemwide and stimulating other tissues to produce the materials necessary to fix the problem.
The devoted study of immunology, of which the language which cells use to communicate with each other is central, has been pushed aside for many years by the larger, more established, more prestigious research groups both in academia and in the industry. When I worked at Abbott Laboratories, starting in '99, I found that their immunology department had recently been all but terminated in favor of shuffling the money to the devoted disease areas. While treating the diseases as separate from the body has led to some novel treatments (eg. antiangionesis and apoptosis for cancer) it seemed, to me, that a whole boatload of data which pointed to the potential cures available within the body itself were being ignored--not because they lacked scientific merit--but because the social structures within the company (and the industry) were attached to the research paths which were easier for the marketers and PR releases to handle.
To some extent that's the way things must work. The venture capitalists and investors need to know where their money is going or else they aren't going to contribute. That's a sad state of society, though, when one group's ignorance is stifling another group's innovation [slashdot.org].
The study of immunology has quite a bit of potential for worldwide medicine. ImClone managed to open the popular path with its approach of monoclonal antibodies, though that segment was somewhat sabotaged by the insider trading scandal. Let's hope that companies like Inimex, and hopefully some companies in the US, will begin to devote greater resources to understanding how the body naturally works and working with it. Many of the detrimental side effects of today's pharmaceuticals are directly related to the immune system's response to those molecules being introduced into the body. The industry has really created its own problem of side effects by buckling in to the demands of the financiers and not holding to the strict scientific principles.
Even though they're in Vancouver I sent a resume.
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As Vancouver is consistently ranked as one of the world's best cities, I can not begin to fathom how you see that as an "even though."
Clean = Immune Retardation (Score:5, Insightful)
The end result is that a person's immune system no longer has to do it's job, job gets done for it. The immune system becoems weaker, they get sick more, then get more anti-biotics.
Wash, Rinse, Repeat.
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One day, he came to work with half of his face paralyzed, to hand me a disability notice, saying he thought that this had happened because he had eaten ice cream at home, just be
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This is an interesting theory that has been kicking around for some time. But then again what do yo
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Stop putting triclosan, etc. in every fucking toiletry and soap under the sun.
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Stop putting triclosan, etc. in every fucking toiletry and soap under the sun.
Ok I agree with being against "antibacterial" soaps, unless for wound cleaning or surgical prep. It's just a marketing thing, regular soap and water is just as good for household purposes.
But people can die from chickenpox. Admittedly, not many people. 99% suffer no lasting effects apart from
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Pretty damn high apparently, consider heart disease, obesity, type II diabetes, etc.
>Another example is the HPV vaccine. Cervical cancer is fully preventable with routine pap smears.
Blah blah blah. I'm already down on record regarding this one. HPV is not nearly as big of a deal as people
are *now* making it out to be (thanks to marketing). If you want to get vaccinated for it, fine. But don't
requ
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Whilst in most cases this causes just a mild disease it can have nasty complications, especially amongst adults. "shingles" is a far more disabling disease caused by the same virus.
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they reach puberty. But in the mean time, wait and see. Apparently medical workers in the UK get
vaccinated if they've not developed resistance, but otherwise there is vaccination program for it.
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With the tone of some of the adverts ("There is more bacteria on your chopping board/table/baby's high chair than your toilet sea
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Quite a bit of the advertising for smothering homes with bacteria killing chemicals comes with a "for the children" undercurrent. Quite a few of these chemicals appear to be quite toxic to human beings too.
Without exposure t
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Your choice of words, and that outlook, are disturbing. We are stand-alone human animals, but we have complex symbiotic relationships with all the critters and bugs that live within and on us.
'Getting clean' and 'excellent hygeine' are relative terms.
What is a perfectly 'clean' dwelling? It is a chamber of death. Every living thing has been killed off.
We exist in a world of the living, not sterile chambers. We need to cope with and live with the othe
Not a replacement (Score:4, Insightful)
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Actually one could argue that the immune system works very well, in fact. Only in these cases the bacteria found a way to adapt to it so that it wouldn't harm them. Neutralizing hydrogen peroxide, or inhibiting phagocytosis, etc. The damage done from TB is caused by your own immune system, not by the bacteria. Those guys are just trying to, like, get along, man! Compare this to, say, Staph pyog
Not FROM a superbug... (Score:5, Informative)
We show that an innate defense-regulator peptide (IDR-1) was protective in mouse models of infection with important Gram-positive and Gram-negative pathogens, including methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus and Salmonella enterica serovar Typhimurium. When given from 48 h before to 6 h after infection, the peptide was effective by both local and systemic administration. Because protection by IDR-1 was prevented by in vivo depletion of monocytes and macrophages, but not neutrophils or B- and T-lymphocytes, we conclude that monocytes and macrophages are key effector cells. IDR-1 was not directly antimicrobial: gene and protein expression analysis in human and mouse monocytes and macrophages indicated that IDR-1, acting through mitogen-activated protein kinase and other signaling pathways, enhanced the levels of monocyte chemokines while reducing pro-inflammatory cytokine responses. To our knowledge, an innate defense regulator that counters infection by selective modulation of innate immunity without obvious toxicities has not been reported previously.
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Mother nature likes to have options.
Info is from a plagarism site/spam blog (Score:5, Informative)
The article is a link to a spam blog. The original content is in this press release [publicaffairs.ubc.ca], which was copied without attribution. The original source and contact information were removed, six ads were added, and a false claim of copyright was made.
The people behind this are Web Doodle LLC [webdoodle.net] of Missoula, MT, run (as of 2002) by Branden Long. They have other similar spam blogs.
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Am I the only one to misread it as... (Score:3, Funny)
Well, now, that's a nice way to put it. (Score:3)
The antibotics are under threat--more accurately, we are under threat from those bacteria--because of poor medical practices. Not from everyone, of course, but from a tremendous number of people. (And the inefficiencies that have evolved into medicine are ridiculous, but that's another story--though one which makes it harder to rectify the real problems.) There are hundreds of hospitals that aren't strict about things like, for example, having people wash their hands before drawing blood, or, if they're putting on a new set of gloves to do it, not touching non-sterile surfaces until after they've drawn the blood. If you do that (and follow similar rules before starting an IV, etc...), you cut the number of staph infections down to almost nothing--to a tiny fraction of what they are otherwise. Just a few simple procedures...
But there are hospitals where those procedures don't happen. On a regular basis. So staph is hundreds of times more prevalent than it would be if people--people who are supposedly trained--did a few simple things as part of their working habits. I'm thinking of one Canadian hospital where a relative of mine was for a few days, but similar incompetence happens in the states, too. There was a hospital in Hawaii where I know of them managing to break six of a patient's ribs in the days before he died. You need to know which hospitals to go to, and you need to keep your wits about you when you're there.
Erm... Well, that was a bit of a rant. =)
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Poor patient practice - not completing the full course of ant
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Just clear the floor, and have some robot or remote control steer it in.
Kill all the crud sitting and flying around once a week and hospitals would have less of a problem.
(In addition to hand washing and plain dumb mistakes that is.)
Gamma globulin? (Score:2)
Collateral damage? (Score:4, Interesting)
As I understand, this peptide temporarily boosts the immune system, which then is better able to fight off the invading organism. However, there are a number of medical conditions caused by an immune system that's a little too heightened--allergies for example, or a number of other, more serious conditions. When I was 21, I contracted "Rapidly Progressive Glomerulonephritis" which is a condition where the immune system attacks the nodules in your kidneys that filter your blood. I now have a kidney transplant as a result. Lupus, I believe, is another serious condition resulting from an overactive immune system.
If we start prescribing this peptide the way we currently prescribe antibiotics, what are the chances that more than the patient's immune system will attack more than just the intended target? Also, what if, like me, you have an intentionally weakened immune system (to prevent transplant rejection), when you take this peptide? Will you be at greater risk to reject the transplant, since the transplanted organ is a foreign body?
QUIT FEEDING ANTIBIOTICS (Score:2, Insightful)
Sounds good, but ... (Score:3, Insightful)
- anything that boosts immune response in a non-specific way runs the risk of causing over-reaction, at least in some people. (Think about the six healthy volunteers in England who nearly died because of an unexpected immune response to the drug they were testing.) Again, that means it'll likely only be usable in a closely supervised, hospital setting.
- since the publication is appearing in one of the Nature journals, you can be pretty sure this does exactly what it says it does, and really is a breakthrough for the particular immune response in question.
- re the commenter earlier who said there was no evidence of antibiotic resistance appearing except due to hospital misuse: total claptrap. Just one example: antibiotic resistance has been documented developing in chickens and cattle due to antibiotics in the feed. Those bacteria can pass to humans. Sometimes they cause symptoms, sometimes they don't. But even when they don't, bacteria are capable of passing bits of DNA back and forth, and genes for antibiotic resistance are -- for obvious reasons -- among the likeliest to persist in bacterial populations. So, if you eat a tainted hamburger, say, or spinach, the disease-causing bacteria on that item can mix it up with the other bacteria in your gut, and there you are. Fun, huh?
Boosted Immune system != Good.... (Score:4, Informative)
A heightened immune system causes Psoriasis, Psoriatic Arthritis, Osteo Arthritis, Rheumatoid arthritis, Allergies, Graves Syndrome, Crohn's Disease, and a whole host of things that range from unpleasant (allergies and Osteo Arthritis) to seriously painful (Psoriatic Arthritis) to life threatening (Crohn's and very severe psoriasis). I live it every day. It's ranging from my major discomfort with the current 5000+ pollen count on my business trip to Atlanta (where I'm sitting now) where Zyrtec is barely effective, to my Psoriasis (which gets worse when my immune system gets excitied like it is with my allergies pumped up) that leaves me with large raw bloody areas that pass for skin. Yeah... I know... you really wanted to read that while you ate dinner... welcome to my life.
Trust me... DON'T overactivate your immune system.... live well, take antibiotics only when you HAVE to and for as long as you have to, and enjoy a normal and healthy immune system.
um (Score:2, Informative)
The discovery, in animal models, will be published March 25 in the journal Nature Biotechnology.
Smart People Missing The Point..... (Score:3, Interesting)
People don't understand that by having EVERYTHING, EVERY surface, EVERY food, and drink super-duper sanitized, we are doing more harm to ourselves than if we were not. Germs are what gives our immune system its effectiveness, and by reducing things it has to fight against, it loses the opportinities to recognize, learn about, and fight off foreign invaders.
People NEED to get sick. Period. There is no logical argument against that. The more sanitary we get, the sicker we become. Humans evolved through experiences with germs. If germs were as evil as a thing as we are being led to believe, then the human race, and just about all life, would not exist today. Immunity from diseases cannot be taught. Human beings can only learn how to fight off an illness by experiencing it.
Unfortunately, being anti-germ is a socially and politically correct thing to do, because your average idiot doesn't understand that you can beat your enemy be using it.
People NEED to get sick. People NEED to die. It's how he human race got to where it is, and now we are destroying the very germs we need to maintain effective immune systems. No drug can replace an immune system.
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Re:Headline missing a keyword (Score:5, Interesting)
Except that antibiotic-resistant strains are generally less virulent than the old-fashioned kind. It doesn't mean they can't kill you, of course -- obviously they do kill people, all the time -- but most of their victims are already immunocompromised in some way (the very old, the very young, AIDS patients, chemotherapy patients, etc.) Generating the enzymes necessary for antibiotic resistance, such as penicillinase, represents a pretty significant metabolic load for the cell; every bit of energy it has to spend protecting itself from antibiotics is a bit it doesn't have available to spend on reproduction.
I'm not trying to downplay the danger of antibiotic-resistant bacteria here, only pointing out that "superbug" is a relative term; just because they're tougher in one way doesn't mean they're tougher in all ways. For bacteria as for every other living thing, fitness is relative to environment.
Re:Headline missing a keyword (Score:4, Informative)
Also, methicillin-resistant staph aureus doesn't infect only immunocompromised hosts. Neither do vancomycin-resistant enterobacteria. Pseudomonas aeruginosa is a major, major pathogen that affects immunocompetent people and still manages to be resistant to a lot of antibiotics.
Pathogenic bacteria are bad. Pathogenic bacteria that are antibiotic resistant are worse.
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A common misconception (Score:2, Informative)
The view that antibiotic-resistant strains are less virulent is rapidly falling out of favor with bugs such as community acquired MRSA, XDR-TB and VRE. We are seeing bugs that are as virulent if not more in the case of CA-MRSA that are wrecking havoc on human hosts as they not only are antibiotic resistant but have specific virulence factors to work in human hosts. Panton-. Valentin leukocidin (i may
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That's sounds a bit emotional. If it has any basis in scientific fact you haven't established it. I believe you're espousing the age old theory that we'll eventually destroy ourselves by playing with nature. That mad scientists with blow us all up.
When automobiles were invented, some people believed it was unhealthy and dangerous to travel faster than 30 miles an hour because it wasn't natural. People make similar arguments again cloning.
Ever si
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That's sounds a bit emotional. If it has any basis in scientific fact you haven't established it.
I believe you're espousing the age old theory that we'll eventually destroy ourselves by playing with nature.
That mad scientists with blow us all up.
Actually the "massive superbug" theory , regardless of if you believe it will kill you, is rooted in scientific FACT, not emotion. The theory is basically same as evolution, overuse of antibiotics and anti-bacterial stuff will kill all but the most resistant, hard to kill, strains. Shifting the survival rate of the bacteria to the most resistant strains will make antibiotics ineffective. Furthermore, because rate of exposure of humans to bacteria is significantly lower, our ability to produce antibodies wi
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Just because abusing something can cause harm, does not mean you do not use it - mean you be smart about how you use it.
-Em
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Not me. I'm tempered in raw sewage!
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If there is abuse of antibiotics, it is with livestock and perhaps the elderly. Average people are not getting antibiotics for the "sniffles."
-matthew
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Maybe. Maybe not. The immune system is pretty darned complex (ask any medical student - I know I hated it!), with many different pathways, and we haven't finished understanding it ourselves yet. Really TFA was rather vague ("stimulation of infection-clearing chemokines"), but I would safely assume that since TFA
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I agree, but either way Immunology still sucks
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Ahh, but does it work on terrorists?
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for complex clauses. Is red banana juice the juice of a red banana, or banana juice which is red?
The title refers to a new weapon against superbugs, not a new superbug to be used as a weapon.
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Otherwise, you're SOL.
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When can we start feeding them to all of our cattle?