Totally Drug-Resistant TB Emerges In India 346
ananyo writes "Physicians in India have identified a form of incurable tuberculosis there, raising further concerns over increasing drug resistance to the disease (abstract). Although reports call this latest form a 'new entity,' researchers suggest that it is instead another development in a long-standing problem. The discovery makes India the third country in which a completely drug-resistant form of the disease has emerged, following cases documented in Italy in 2007 and Iran in 2009."
Not *totally* drug resistant (Score:5, Insightful)
We just haven't found a drug to fight it. And before people get on the anti-antibiotics bandwagon, if we didn't use antibiotics, then the simplest infection would be "Totally Drug-Resistant".
Now if you want to speak of the "overuse" or preventative use of antibiotics, then go ahead.
Watch out Indonesia (Score:5, Interesting)
Isn't the real story that it's in three countries, and that they are geographically disparate?
Or... does the disease only affect countries that start with the letter I?
Re:Watch out Indonesia (Score:5, Informative)
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Why unfortunately?
It seems to me, if you had to have a incurable decease in your country you would want it to be quarantined, an to infect the people you like the least. A prison seems like the best place to have diseases, where else would you want it? In nurseries, in supermarkets?
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The problem is that prisoners get released or escape and they're typically packed in tightly enough that the disease can easily spread. If you're not really careful or quite lucky you end up in a situation where there are people who have done their time and can't be released because they're infected. Many of whom wouldn't have been infected if not for the conditions in the prison.
If there's going to be an outbreak, I personally would rather it be somewhere that's actually set up to deal with such a thing or
Re:Watch out Indonesia (Score:5, Insightful)
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Supermarkets are probably a good place to have diseases. Much of the food is either tinned (so isolated from it) or will be washed, and in either case it will likely be cooked (killing most bacteria and deactivating most viruses). Meanwhile, most shoppers won't be exposed for any significant time, which means they stand a far better chance of building up resistance than to suffering any hardship. Ok, no place is "great" to have disease, but in terms of opportunities to strengthen health vs. impair it, I'd c
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Re:Watch out Indonesia (Score:4, Insightful)
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I reserve my humanity for people who act humanely. Is that bad?
On the other hand, not everyone in prison did something inhumane.
Re:Watch out Indonesia (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, because it ultimately means that you're no more humane than the prisoners are. When you start deciding that some people do and do not deserve to be treated humanely you open up the door for all sorts of inhuman behavior. Sure it's not a guarantee that one will turn into a genocidal mad man, but accepting the premise that some people don't deserve to be treated humanely makes it a significantly shorter trip.
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Re:Watch out Indonesia (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the humane thing to do with this thread is let it die and get back on topic.
Re:Watch out Indonesia (Score:4, Insightful)
Thank you for proving my point. It doesn't matter what somebody does, acting in an inhumane fashion is never OK. In that situation you yourself would end up in prison and would, by your logic, not be entitled to humane treatment.
It doesn't matter how much value criminals put in their victims, unless you genuinely want to live in a society of sociopaths and psychopaths, treating everybody with humanity is really the only correct course of action.
We have a government to handle such things precisely because most people aren't emotionally prepared to handle such things in an emotionally disinterested way and only seek justice.
To quote Ghandi, an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.
Re:Watch out Indonesia (Score:5, Insightful)
Wrong answer to my post. People who talk like you end up giving more value to the criminals than to victims.I expect such from someone like you though to write a response like you did, and you fell for it.
I would KILL, perhaps even in a painful and gruesome manner, someone raping my wife or daughters, which is NOT humane to them, but is humane to my wife or daughters. You are confusing not being humane with being inhuman. There is a distinct difference.
This is precisely why, in civilized societies, there is dispassionate legal system. There's a line between punishment of justice and vengeance of bloodlust that can only be crossed in a might-makes-right anarchy.
I find your choice of handle to be rather curiously, if the quote reflects your true feelings.
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What if it were statutory rape? I don't know how old your daughter is, but let's say at some point in time either the future or the past she has or had sex with an over age boyfriend (for whatever the statutory age and close in age exemptions happen to be in your jurisdiction). Would you gruesomely murder the raping boyfriend then? If she's in love with the guy, how is that humane to your daughter? He would still be just as guilty under the law as someone who raped an adult woman by force. Quite possible mo
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So, to be clear, a man/woman in a mutual relationship with a man/woman 1 day from the statutory age where it would be legal for them to have sex who has sex, without any force involved deserves *death*, no exceptions, no appeal. Meanwhile, 5 miles from where the crime was committed, across a state line, a couple with the exact same ages could have sex and it's perfectly legal. Do you understand why this bothers people? The fact that the exact same actions can either be completely ok (well, maybe not to busy
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> but in most cases, I don't blink an eye when a criminal is killed by a police officer while resisting arrest
It seems to me that "resisting arrest" is the most common way for police officers to frame/entrap innocent people, so, yes, I think you should be blinking a bit more, perhaps? Or were you thinking about the kind of extravagant resistance sometimes seen in movies and on TV?
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I reserve my humanity for people who act humanely. Is that bad?
Inconveniently(but as is generally true with situations where a given disease has a popular association with some flavor of moral failing), infectious diseases are generally quite happy to fester among the undesirables and then start leaking into the general population by whatever intersections between us and them exist but are politely not thought about.
Even if every inmate deserved it, anybody who would rather not have prison guards and their families, inmates released after comparatively short sentenc
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You are clueless of the cost of end of life care.
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I had really meant the question to mean: what population should society prefer a disease to run through, if it were to run through any, such that this population should qualify as 'unfortunate' compared to any other.
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That just means the U.S. of A. is safe from this disease because none of the letters are "I."
Re:Watch out Indonesia (Score:5, Informative)
STANDARD != FREE. Where I live, TB vaccinations are required for kids entering school. This is STANDARD. FREE is when you get somebody else to pay for it. Admittedly most of us have insurance to pay for it. Those without generally get the vaccinations for free anyway.
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Insurance is the very definition of getting someone else to pay for you.
Most insureds cover their own costs and then some. (Score:3)
Insurance is the very definition of getting someone else to pay for you.
I'm not sure you understand how insurance works. Whether or not insurance means getting someone else to pay for you depends entirely on how much you've paid into the system, and how much insurance payout you (successfully) claim.
In a very simple example, if I've paid $150/mo for five years and only make one claim of $500, of which only $200 is over my deductible, the insurance company is ahead by $8,800.
In the specific context of TB vaccinations, I rather doubt that the cost of a child's vaccination will e
Re:Watch out Indonesia (Score:5, Informative)
It is becoming common problem in EU too. Maybe not totally resistant TB, but very hard to cure. What amazes me, is that in North America the TB vaccine is not standard (read my leaps: FREE), and the result is that when (not if) some american catches TB, he will be helpless.
There is no good tuberculosis vaccine. There is the BCG vaccine which confers some measure of immunity, but it's not very impressive. The problem with BCG is that is screws up SCREENING for TB via the PPD (skin prick test). Once you've had a BCG vaccination, you are going to test positive for TB in that screen, so you have to go to expensive and slightly dangerous X rays to determine active disease and you're pretty much hosed at determining 'latent' disease (where someone has been exposed, has the bug stuck deep inside their lungs but the critter hasn't multiplied - yet - in a couple of percentage points of people with latent TB it will go active at some point in their life so they often get treated before it progresses).
In countries where TB is epidemic, it often makes sense to use BCG. In the US and Western Europe, probably not but it's a complicated argument.
We really need 1) better vaccines and 2) better ways of detecting early infections. It's not for want of trying, it's just a nasty little bug.
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Any vaccine will ruin a test for antibodies. What we need is a direct test for the bacteria.
Re:Watch out Indonesia (Score:5, Interesting)
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That test requires weeks to months since TB grows so slowly.
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Any vaccine will ruin a test for antibodies. What we need is a direct test for the bacteria.
It lives in the lungs... FOR GOD SAKES!
It obviously doesn't stay there though otherwise it could never spread to another person... so maybe a paper bag treated with some reactive agent that the patient can cough into would be the sort of test the GP was thinking of.
Re:Not *totally* drug resistant (Score:5, Insightful)
There's no such thing as an anti-antibiotics bandwagon. Does not exist.
If you search for the phrase "ban antibiotics" you will ONLY find results for people opposed to agricultural antibiotic use on healthy animals. That's it.
There are enough stupid movements to hate without having to invent new ones.
Re:Not *totally* drug resistant (Score:5, Funny)
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He's an antipseudodisestablishmentarian, give him a break.
Re:Not *totally* drug resistant (Score:4, Interesting)
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GP: "Now if you want to speak of the "overuse" or preventative use of antibiotics, then go ahead."
Re:Not *totally* drug resistant (Score:5, Insightful)
They are *not* candy, some doctors prescribe them like they are and some patents demand them like they should be....
All antibiotics by their very nature disrupt the balance of the non aggressive bacteria which your body tolerates to produce extra essential vitamins in the gut and to cloud out the explicitly pathogenic varieties in the skin and elsewhere. This means that they come with a risk of skin rashes, minor stomach upsets gas and other such issues, particularly heavy use may cause more serious issues on occasion. Because of these issues you should only take antibiotics for real infections or serious wounds not colds or coughs, unless you have particular risk factors.
Despite these issues refusing them when you have a serious problem is madness, they are a powerful tool and a boon to our average lifespan and health that has not yet been equalled by any other single class of technology, wanting to cut unnecessary use to improve effectiveness and reduce risk is not the same as wanting to stop using them.
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Re:Not *totally* drug resistant (Score:5, Interesting)
I was attacked in mid-December by a cat, which bit my left hand harder than I knew cats could - twice. (It was an indoor feral cat we care for, and we were moving, and I had to get him in a cage. And yes, eventually we both calmed down and got him moved.)
Initially my hand swelled to twice its normal size, and then the wounds started to fester. This was within a day. Fortunately I went to the doctor the morning after it occurred, and by the time the wounds were filling with pus I was already ramping up 10 days of antibiotics. The infection was gone within three days (but of course I dutifully took the entire 10 day regimen). My hand still hurt a little but it's usable.
In retrospect, I've been thinking that just 100 years ago I very well could have either lost my hand or died. Now my biggest concern was a few weeks of pain and inability to use my hand, and maybe one or two small scars.
I am very grateful for the discovery and medical application of antibiotics, and I very much support restrictions with antibiotics to cases where they are mandatory. Doctors and patients abuse painkillers, so we restrict access to them and control their use closely so as to prevent the patients from hurting themselves. Doctors and patients abuse antibiotics, so why don't we restrict access to them and control their use closely so as to prevent patients from hurting all of humanity?
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I'm not a doctor but my family practice guy explained it to me like this: That viral infection can make you much more susceptible to opportunistic bacterial infections. Depending on your health history, it might be reasonable and appropriate to start preventative antibiotics to ward off a likely, harder-to-fight illness.
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I've had chest infections in the past, and the doctor has told me it's viral, and then that he's going to prescribe me some antibiotics. Wait... what? "It won't cure it, but it might help you get over it" or something along those lines was his attitude.
That's prophylactic treatment to prevent opportunistic infections.
Now I am screwed should I ever catch a real disease and need such things, although as I'm a dairy farmer my immune system is pretty good comparably.
Penicillin is hardly the only available antibiotic. It's not even used all that much due to many people being allergic to it and there being more effective antibiotics of that class available.
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Classic examples of conflating correlation with causation with a dash or ignorance.
A) When you get sick, it opens other ways for you to get sicker. Like increased susceptibility to bacterial infection. You had a chest infect, the chance of you getting pneumonia became much higher.
B) You might want to get your nerves and heart tested, preferably a stress test. the numbness is not from antibiotics.
Most likely it's normal result form certain physical activity, but now that you are looking for hits to confirm
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" we won't try no more."
really?
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Except those people aren't opposed to using antibiotics in cases of bacterial infection that warrants it, they're opposed to giving it to live stock just for the hell of it or giving it to people that likely have a viral infection.
Nobody's anti-antibiotics even if some of us think that we need to progress beyond them to using something a little bit longer term like phages.
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There's no such thing as an anti-antibiotics bandwagon. Does not exist.
Sure there is. You've never heard of probiotics?
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Re:Not *totally* drug resistant (Score:5, Funny)
And how do you plan to crucify the patients who do not take the full course of antibiotics they are prescribed?
I assume he plans to use nails. Is that how pretty much everybody does it?
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This, I thought most of the antibiotic resistant TB was the result of people starting the prescribed antibiotics and not continuing through to the end. Leaving them with mostly just the resistant bacteria and having to start over again.
Re:Not *totally* drug resistant (Score:5, Informative)
Some of it is. TB requires prolonged treatment. 3 months is regarded as the absolute minimum treatment duration. 6 months is suitable for most cases. 12-24 months is needed for severe cases, or for cases affecting certain organs (brain or spine). Anti-TB antibiotics also have severe side effects - liver damage, nerve damage, permanent eye damage, they severely disrupt the biochemistry of other drugs (potentially causing them to become ineffective, or overactive), etc.
In poorer countries, patients/doctors may not be able to afford a full course of drugs, and may therefore cut it short. Uneducated patients may also stop the treatment when they start to feel better, and not carry the course through to the end (and in poorer countries, there may not be a system for doctors/law enformcenet to trace them and bring them back for treatment).
Additionally, tests for TB have are very time-consuming and expensive. It can take 8 weeks to get a drug-sensitivity test, and that's if the test comes back positive anyway (one of the problems with TB, is that it is very good at hiding, and the bugs are very difficult to grow). Where funding is constrained, diagnosis is simply by looking for the bugs in a sputum specimen with a microscope - which tells you nothing about the sensitivities. There is a signficant cost of incubating the specimens on special growth media for 8 weeks, and a low success rate. Because of this, doctors in these countries may not be able to diagnose drug resistance, except when drugs fail to halt the disease after 6 months.
The avoidance of resistance in anti-biotic treatment is best achieved by mixing multiple drugs of different types. Conventionally TB is treated with a cocktail of 3 or 4 drugs. If, however, you use those 3 drugs, ih a population that is infected with a bug that is resistant to 2 of them, then resistance to the single functioning agent, can develop very rapidly.
Things are changing with advanced test kits and DNA amplification technology, which are able to detect the genes that confer resistance, and give a result, with high accuracy and high reliability within 24 hours. The problem is the significant cost of this testing technique.
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Why is it tyrannical to require doctors to practice medicine properly to retain their licenses?
If you fail to drive properly you will lose that license. This is what licenses are for, to restrict a set of activities to those who are qualified and do them properly.
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As someone has been treated for TB, I can comment on that. King county in Washington state Public Health department had to witness me take a dozen or so antibiotic pills a day for a year. They even showed up once at work and pulled me out of a meeting. Beats coughing up blood though, even if the nausea was tough. They never figured out how a single (at the time) office worker got infected.
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exactly what I was thinking, in india antibiotics are used as if it was water.When I was there last year, newspapers adviced against eating honey because it was completely saturated with antibiotics. (another food scandal at the time was chickpeas coloured green and sold as peas)
I am Jack's complete and utter lack of surprise. (Score:3)
in india antibiotics are used as if it was water
Yeah, I've heard about this. In particular, about them being given out like M&Ms, even for viral infections where the doctors knew damn well that they'd do nothing useful, but wanted to pander to the patients. That's not even the OP's "overuse", it's blatant and irresponsible misuse that was obviously going to cause major grief at some point- well, here we are.
I've heard it said that such people had no other option, but since their only "option" didn't work, the doctors would have been more responsibl
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And, to make things even worse, the standard from what I've seen among the Indians I have worked with is to take the antibiotics until starting t
Re:Not *totally* drug resistant (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem isn't using antibiotics to fight bacterial infections.
The problem is incorrectly using antibiotics, much of which comes from IGNORANCE and POVERTY
1) Ignorance: lack of education on how antibiotics work, and a frightening number of people stop taking the antibiotics as soon as they start feeling better - VERY BAD IDEA!
2) Poverty: medicines are expensive, and so people who are tight on money will "share" drugs, with other people to save on costs. This goes hand in hand with ignorance about how the drugs work.
The answer to this (and many other problems) is universal education and healthcare.
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All viruses are drug-resistant, the conversation is about bacteria.
Re:Not *totally* drug resistant (Score:5, Insightful)
You misunderstand the problem. Antibiotics are not the problem. The overuse of antibiotics is the problem. I hear about this every single week from my wife, who is a provider. She constantly gets pressured by patients to prescribe antibiotics when they are clearly not necessary or justified. We have to change the culture of medical care here in the U.S.
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Overusing antibiotics isn't a big problem if you take them properly.
Problems arise when people use them for legitimate reasons, but don't follow your full course of treatment.
It happens in the US, but it is a much greater problem in developing countries where people lack education and money to follow what the doctor prescribed. Why would they want to waste money taking pills once they feel better.
Re:Not *totally* drug resistant (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a silly claim. There are antibiotics that can kill most of the resistant bacteria. We know many of them. Problem is, they also kill the host when host is human, typically by destroying kidneys or liver.
It's not that we don't have the tools to kill these "super germs". We do. We just don't have the tools that kill the germs without killing the humans. Essentially we're paving the path for bacteria that adapt to antibiotics as a threat to their existence by remaining/becoming vulnerable to antibiotics that destroy various internal organs, and becoming resistant to those that do not.
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WTH? If the drug kills people then it's not an antibiotic, it's just a poison.
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Antibiotics are poisons. They just target a set of biochemical pathways that humans don't care too much about.
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Except that new antibiotics aren't really being developed anymore. The last one in wide use, I forget which, was brought out some 20 years ago. The reason: high development cost, combined with fast bacterial adaptation mean that pharmaceutical companies aren't even able to recoup their investment before a drug falls out of use. Source: my infectology professor.
Two possible solutions to this problem I see is raising the price of antibiotics or introducing government subsidies for development.
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What I don't understand is why antibiotics can't be rotated in and out of use. If these bugs adapt in so few generations and have generations so quickly I'd think they'd lose adaptations for immunities that haven't been needed as quickly as they develop new ones.
So why can't we just put penicillin on the shelf for 20 years, use amoxicillian, and then some others and by the time we go through the list penicillin would be highly effective again?
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Antibiotic rotation is an idea that sounds good but that doesn't seem to work well in practice. What seems to happen is that microorganisms evolve in such a way as to neutralize the cost of being resistant. Usually, the initial mutation reduces fitness in the absence of the antibiotic, but then there is selective pressure to accumulate compensatory mutations that eliminate that cost. Once that happens, there is no longer selective pressure to revert to sensitivity even if the use of that antibiotic is disco
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Daptomycin is over 30 years old, but didn't get FDA approval until 2003 due to high incidence of bad side effects (which is why Lilly stopped development during Phase II trials, then sold the rights to Cubist).
I think the point of the OP was that novel methods of attack against bacterial infectious agents aren't being developed... and it's novel methods we need, as resistance generally develops against entire classes of antibioti
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Of course, the more drugs you throw at a problem, the more likely the patient will have a bad reaction.
Re:Not *totally* drug resistant (Score:5, Interesting)
True enough.
Actually there are a couple of means to attack this strain.
1. We should sequence those strains and see if we can identify any weakness to exploit.
2. Discover how their resistance works. For example strains that are resistant to say penicillin tend to make an enzyme that breaks down penicillin. So possibly one could make a drug that binds that enzyme and combine it with the antibiotic or change the antibiotic that the enzyme has no effect or even have the drug activated by the enzyme.
3. Bacteriophages are an interesting but really under researched treatment in the West. The old USSR did a lot of research in to them and frankly we should start as well.
Of course what is really scary are the folks that are no in "raw" milk. They are making claims that it can cure everything from cancer to Autism all the while providing an excellent vector for TB.
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I definitely agree that we should do massive researching into phages. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacteriophage [wikipedia.org]
problem is that big pharma won't do much with phages because they're naturally occurring which i think means no patents - so as soon as one has FDA approval, anyone can produce it,
I wish the government should give out grants to research phages - but big pharma would cry "unfair"
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From the article:
"The fact that no new first-line TB drugs have been developed for half a century has probably contributed to the emergence of strains that are unresponsive to treatment, says Mitnick. “If you keep using the same drugs for that long, resistance is inevitable.”"
“The pharmaceutical industry had scant interest in TB for decades,” says Richard Chaisson, director of the Center for TB Research at th
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Well put!
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Ah - you probably haven't had or don't know somebody who had a drug-resistant bug and had "just" to wait until a drug is found...
We just haven't found a drug
What a jerk you are!
Cough... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Cough... (Score:5, Funny)
that small cough doesn't sound so good. Take all these antibiotics
This would be a bad time for a "Madagascar" joke. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This would be a bad time for a "Madagascar" jok (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a little as if we're extremely incompetent first-year med students trying to eliminate a patient's symptoms (i.e. the planet's inherent imperfection for supporting modern life) and we're on the verge of unintentionally killing off the infection that's actually responsible. (Admittedly, this is a lousy analogy, but it's important to realise that it's happening.)
Re:This would be a bad time for a "Madagascar" jok (Score:5, Interesting)
Also each evolution that allows a bacteria to become resistant to a drug weakens the bacteria in all other cases.
I had not understood this to be true. I keep hearing that strains of bacteria become resistant to all antibiotics. not just a queue of 3, then the next strain is resistant to a 4th antibiotic, but no longer resistant to the first. Evolution does seem to favor specialization, but traits are only lost if they hinder. I don't know exactly what the mechanism of resistance is, but i don't know that each kind of antibiotic requires some new organ to exist resulting in lumpy slow bacteria.
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That explains that weird call to customer support (Score:5, Funny)
I was wondering why "Bob" kept coughing.
This will be unpopular.... (Score:2, Funny)
This will be unpopular....
I understand that we are supposed to be a society of victimology, where it's more important that a single victim feel good about themselves than it is to save society, or the species, as a whole, but...
Maybe it's time to go back to the pre-antibiotic known-working fixes for contagious diseases for which there is no cure, i.e.: sanitariums and leper colonies? At least that way, in two hundred years, there will still be people around to feel morally outraged at the excesses of their
Re:This will be unpopular.... (Score:4, Informative)
It might be popular if it stood a chance of working...
Wikipedia quote:
One third of the world's population is thought to be infected with M. tuberculosis,[3][4] and new infections occur at a rate of about one per second.[3] In 2007 there were an estimated 13.7 million chronic active cases,[5] and in 2010 8.8 million new cases, and 1.45 million deaths, mostly in developing countries.[6] The absolute number of tuberculosis cases has been decreasing since 2006 and new cases since 2002.[6] In addition, more people in the developing world contract tuberculosis because their immune systems are more likely to be compromised due to higher rates of AIDS.[7] The distribution of tuberculosis is not uniform across the globe; about 80% of the population in many Asian and African countries test positive in tuberculin tests, while only 5–10% of the U.S. population test positive.[1]
It sounds like many Asian and African countries need the opposite (a place for all the healthy people to go).
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Tuberculin tests are just that, they test for the antibody. So even people who are no longer infected, or were vaccinated will test positive.
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Re:This will be unpopular.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Distribution of Drug-Resistant TB (Score:5, Informative)
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I personally blame people for stopping the take on the antibiotics in the first place for dooming us all. Man are we seriously moving back to the days of 40 to 150 years ago when we're going to start seeing "Quarantine" signs on houses? Well it sure the hell might be a good idea at this point.
My sister had TB when she was younger, picked it up as a candy striper [wikipedia.org]. The hospital didn't pick it up in the patient in time, new immigrant, no check protocols at the time. This is going back oh almost 20 years no
Not just in India (Score:3)
The cure is obvious (Score:2)
Unless you choose to add silly requirements like "the patient must survive the treatment".
Additional Note: 1 patient ran away (Score:5, Interesting)
It was also mentioned on NPR that one of the patients with the drug-immune TB in India actually checked themselves out of the hospital and they can't find them.
Here's to you our new "Patient Zero"
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"No, I'm, I'm simply saying that life, uh... finds a way. "
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That line of thinking is what some believe led to the creation of AIDS and its multi-targeted appearance around the globe.
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Can you point to a Young Earth Creationist who doesn't think natural selection can account for drug resistance? Because I haven't come across one. Let alone the Old Earthers or more generic Intelligent Design folk.
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KHANNNNNnnnnnnnnnn!!!!
(In case you didn't know, he was supposed to have been an Indian prince).
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@Boregardless: How about you stop your racist tripe and take a dose of facts:
The origin of MSRA has been primarily traced from Europe, and thats where today there are maximum infections (and deaths).
Read:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methicillin-resistant_Staphylococcus_aureus#US_and_UK [wikipedia.org]
Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) primarily originated from UK. MRSA was responsible for 94,360 serious infections and associated with 18,650 hospital stay-related deaths in the United States in 2005. MRSA is
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I'm not racist.
I quite admire the Indian's ability to survive in the face of their societal and economic circumstances where the challenges are huge on multiple levels.
The info I cited came from WHO report data which was in the UK Telegraph, if I remember the source correctly, and it was published about 2 weeks ago.
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You're trying to be funny here, but as the linked nature article says, "Tuberculosis trails behind only HIV as the world’s leading cause of death from infectious disease."-- and unlike HIV, it has been circulating since antiquity. There's a fair bit of speculation (though difficult to prove) that evolutionary pressure from TB has contributed to some types of autoimmune disease susceptibility.
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Stop feeling so superior (and stop being so condescending to others).
Developed countries abuse antibiotics by feeding them to animals for better yields and by doctors kowtowing to worried patients with viral infections.
There are "uneducated idiots" (to use your phrase) everywhere.
As another poster pointed out, drug-resistant TB is everywhere. http://jid.oxfordjournals.org/content/194/4/479.full.pdf [oxfordjournals.org]