Antibiotic-Resistant E Coli Reaches The US For The First Time (reuters.com) 203
New submitter maharvey writes: A woman in Pennsylvania has contracted a strain of E Coli that is unaffected by all known legal antibiotics, including the antibiotics of last resort. We have had bacteria that were resistant, but this is the first bacteria that is completely immune. Such bacteria were known in China, but since the woman has not traveled recently it means she contracted it in the wild in the USA. This is a major step toward the terrifying post-antibiotic world.
the chickens. (Score:4, Insightful)
they've come home to roost.
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50 Years of abuse of Antibiotics.
Now they're more and more busted.
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This is only a problem for factory farms. Regular farms don't need to rely on antibiotics to keep animals healthy.
We should ban factory farming techniques.
It will drive the price of meat up significantly. That's fine; a whole generation of first-worlders can learn just how protein-rich a plant-based diet can be (before you object, be aware that the shaolin monks (the most powerful athletes in the world) live on a strictly vegan diet from the day they start training (at around 5 years of age). If THEY can
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Did you mean vegetarian, rather than vegan? Very different things, those two....also, in one of the cult movies about the monks [the classic one with Jet Li at the age of 17], Li smuggles roasted snake for his fellows monks in order to strengthen them for the coming challenge...even the teacher takes a bite with half-guilty/half-gleeful expression....
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Re:Blame the farmers .. yeah ! (Score:5, Informative)
Real life farmer here. Maybe is the USA cows in pastures are a lie, but in the UK ours spend the summer out in the fields. It's cheaper to keep them in a pasture than in a barn. Also, we don't feed our cows antibiotics. Again, that's something they might do in the US, but in Europe antibiotics in cattle feeds have been banned for quite some time. We have some factory farms in the UK also, but nothing the size of many US herds. One farmer wanted to build an eight thousand head farm, but it made national news and there was massive public resistance. They do not want that sort of farm in the UK.
If you want to blame farmers for using such practises, blame yourself for looking for the cheapest food you can get. Supermarkets compete on prices. You wanted cheap food, you got cheap food. Now, you realise the price of that cheap food. The farmers were just giving people what they wanted, the cheapest food they could produce. Did you ever pick up an item at the supermarket and think that it was too cheap? When it comes to many quality foods, people should really stop asking themselves "Why is it so expensive?" and ask "Why is the other stuff so cheap?"
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If price was the only thing people shopped on, we wouldn't eat so much meat in the first place. Meat is extremely expensive since it just takes a lot more resources to create a pound of beef than it does a pound of carrots.
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Everywhere you look, you see tragedy of the commons. But the libertarians continue to blame regulation.
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That's stupid. Whose private property will the air fall under if we abolish the government? OK, suppose it's yours. How are you even remotely capable of protecting your private property from exploitation by others without government regulation?
Private property exists because regulations exist to protect private property. Regulation creates things like mineral rights and spectrum rights and land deeds.
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That is crazy. Antibiotics are used in farming to make bigger, beefier animals. Not "keep them alive"...
Re:Blame the farmers .. yeah ! (Score:4, Informative)
Personal responsibility (or rather "don't give a shit about anyone but yourself") yes. But god forbid corporations would be responsible for anything they do! That could endanger jobs! Not to mention profits.
Re: Blame the farmers .. yeah ! (Score:2)
You are conflating the politics of personal responsibility which is a by-product of conservative thinking and corporatism which is a by-product of the entrenched American oligarchy.
One serves as a guide for personal decision making and political critique. The other is a means of subverting control of the populace and funneling all wealth through a small percentage of already-wealthy business owners.
How do you mix those up?
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Me? I don't need to mix them, they are already mixed. The same people preach personal responsibility and "take care of yourself" are protecting corporations and bailing them out.
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"War on Christianity"? Melodrama much?
Only in America would giving someone rights be seen as taking away someone else's rights.
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Not wanting to piss on your parade (aside of telling you that Austria-Hungary hasn't been a thing for about 100 years, similar to your attitude), but you are aware that one of the first groups to go are the anti-vaxers, right?
Not that I'd complain about that last part.
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That was a metric ruler you used, you gained 40mm... and the pills had nothing to do with it, you just got a boner from rubbing a ruler on your genitals... but well done on 41mm.
Antibiotic abuse and biodiversity (Score:5, Insightful)
Biodiversity is a good thing, but we're destroying it. We need to allow nature to create new antibiotics and use those as needed.
Also, there are some fucking absurd abuses of antibiotics. Doctors are way too quick to wrote prescriptions when they aren't necessary. We need to stop prescribing antibiotics when they aren't necessary for infections that will be stopped by the body's immune system or as preventive measures.
Furthermore, we shouldn't be wasting antibiotics on animals, especially for cattle. I'm sorry that one of the animals in your herd is sick. There's no fucking reason to put antibiotics in the feed of all of your cattle. That's fucking ridiculous. Don't use antibiotics on cattle.
This is a fucking big deal. People who misuse antibiotics should lose their license to practice medicine. I'd also support prison time for it.
Re:Antibiotic abuse and biodiversity (Score:5, Interesting)
Perhaps this woman's imminent death can serve as a rallying point to ban the (grossly irresponsible) use of antibiotics in foodstock fodder.
Expect the foodstock industry to fight any such suggestion tooth and nail of course. Such a ban will cost them money since foodstock put on weight more slowly when not dosed with low levels of antibiotics, and any scare stories about antibiotics-resistant bacteria are "so many radical treehuggers' fantasies" of course.
"Huh ... it's already happened you say? I thought we had another five years at least. Hmm ... denounce the linkage a speculation based on evolution theory, increase the lobbyist budget, and see if we can't get a deal with a nice understanding conservative presidential candidate."
Why oh why do we need to actually see an antibiotics-resistant bacteria infect somebody before we'll acknowledge the blindingly obvious about to happen?
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The only problem is that, like climate change, it's already too late. We should have taken control of antibiotics use *before* antibiotic-immune bacteria evolved. Now it's too late.
But as usual, people are too greedy and short sighted to care about minor details like destroying the single biggest and most important defence modern medicine has to help people.
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it's already too late
I call bullshit. Sure we need new antibiotics, but if we don't correct the institutional malpractices, those too will become useless before long.
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No it's not.
Pardon me for being crude, but the fact that we are seeing one patient infected by an antibiotic resistant bacteria doesn't mean the end of the world (except perhaps for that one patient).
By and large we'll continue being able to treat bacterial infections with antibiotics, but the probability of some of those ca
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>Second best. Vaccine's are the best.
No, they belong on different scales as they target different kinds of diseases. Vaccines are a defense against viral infections. Antiobiotics against bacteria. A huge contributor to our current problem was misusing the latter on infections of the former kind - where it has no efficacy whatsoever, but does help grow resistant bacteria.
You can't compare them and say "X" is better than "Y" though, since they are used for different purposes. It's like trying to say that "
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Why oh why do we need to actually see an antibiotics-resistant bacteria infect somebody before we'll acknowledge the blindingly obvious about to happen?
Because, Sir, we as a species are dumb.
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If you read the article in the NYT you see that it wasn't resistant to a different antibiotic (that they presumably treated it with). The issue is that bacteria can swap DNA and so it's now "out there". All that needs to happen is for one bacteria to grab on to this at the same time that it has everything else.
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link http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05... [nytimes.com]
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Is e-coli really that dangerous? Last time I got it, it gave me a stomach ache.. I cried for like five hours, then it went away; then I shit my ass the next morning.
Salmonella gives me a headache and the shits (even like the fifth time in three months), and I generally ignore it. People panic over that, too.
Pro tip: if the beef smells rotten or you managed to make some wicked pink chicken by accidentally undercooking it, maybe you should do something besides eat that.
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Depends on the strain (some produce some really nasty toxins), and who's getting it. Some E. coli is harmless, and lives commensally in your gut, helping you digest your food.
On the other hand, enterohaemorrhagic E. coli O157:H7 (EHEC) can give you acute kidney failure, and has killed children and old people whose immune systems weren't strong enough.
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Well... we lack anything at all to stop it from doing so.
How soon people forget... less than a hundred years ago the vast majority of bacterial infections were fatal. Penicillin has saved more lives than we can count, probably at least as many as pasteurization (which we've had for 2 centuries longer). Destroying the efficacy of our most powerful life-saving weapon through overuse remains one of the most monumentally stupid things humanity could ever do and we seem hellbent on doing it.
This is the bacterial
Re:Antibiotic abuse and biodiversity (Score:5, Informative)
Well... we lack anything at all to stop it from doing so.
We may lack anything. But she has something ... it's called an immune system.
Note, also, that the Reuters story has been corrected. They analyzed the woman's bacteria and noticed it would be resistant to colistin, a "last-resort antibiotic." It's not resistant to all the other ones, too -- unlike what the first version of the story said. It's just that we know bacteria can be resistant to all the other ones, and it wouldn't be so hard for this strain to pick up those other genes, resulting in an unstoppable bacteria. This is not that unstoppable bacteria; but it's proven once again that it is theoretically possible for one to exist.
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Yeah bubonic plague was just a story right. Immune systems are actually pretty limited things without drugs that help them - and historically, most people did NOT survive most infections. There is no evolutionary drive to evolve a GOOD immune system - just good enough for SOME to survive.
Oh and about 99% of natural immune system consists of one organ: the skin. Once an infection gets past that barrier it's odds of killing are pretty high. Even the flu can easily have high fatality rates if just a few condit
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See for example here: http://consumersunion.org/news... [consumersunion.org] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
You'll note that (1) monensin is only one of the antibiotics used in livestock fodder and (2) that not all antibiotics used are ionophores (which means: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] ) that they can pass through the cell membrane in a specific way). Plain old penicillin (which is nicely broad-spectrum, so that lots and lots of bacteria get to feel the evolutionary pressure) is an example of an an
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I'd also support prison time for it.
You underestimate the cost of prisons.
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Especially because it's people who would shit their pants at the prospect of going to prison, so that "deterrent" bullshit would for a change actually do something.
Do you think someone who has literally NOTHING gives a shit about being incarcerated? Someone who doesn't know where to get his next lunch from let along where to put his head next time the piss comes down from above because what he calls "home" is something where "thermal renovation" means burning it down to the ground 'cause that's the cheapest
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Frankly, it makes a helluva lot more sense to throw these people in prison (for risking the wellbeing of the entire human race) than to throw kids in there for smoking some weed and risking exactly no harm to anybody at all.
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There is nothing about illegal immigration that makes disease spreading more likely than legal immigration - at least from the same countries. But the risk of new diseases are not going to be contained or reduced, it's simply beyond our abilities to ever do that. When we encounter a new disease, it's going to kill some people before anybody can develop immunity, let alone vaccines - it's just the nature of reality, you cannot plan for the unpredictable.
But we sure as hell don't need to be dying from old dis
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And for the bacterial infection go phage! Oh, but you can't patent a naturally occurring cure. We can't have that - saving lives without making PROFIT....are you Marxist or something ;)
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Doctors are way too quick to wrote prescriptions when they aren't necessary.
True, but they're also way too reluctant to culture samples on the patient's first presentation. That has nearly no downside (except cost) and avoids the guessing game of "Well, it didn't respond to that antibiotic, let's try this one", which created an increased evolutionary pressure toward multiple resistance.
Perhaps not use antibiotics on animals (Score:5, Insightful)
what about not using antibiotics on living animals? They serve as a feeding ground for antibiotics. The price would be that you have to pay more for products that include flesh, because you would have to isolate the animals better, in order to stop spreading illnesses.
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As a living animal who has been helped by antibiotics, I object.
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While that's a good idea, we don't know she didn't get it from a human. This is only the first reported case. Maybe there's someone out there dropping loose, biotoxic shits from here to Tehachapi
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I would draw it between humans and animals. Maybe pets should get an exception, but even there the list of allowed antibiotics should be highly limited.
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lol, yeah I've misplaced that "living" here.
Nice job humanity! (Score:5, Insightful)
Total Failure of Government and Society and not a good sign for the future of the human race. I personally have been well aware of the risks of Antibiotic-Resistant for over 20 years. This was the text book example of natural selection in my High School Biology class.
Instead of listening to the scientists and public health officals on the risks, we have let the greed and money in big ag run make our laws. We let them dump antibiotics in our livestock food in so we could have cheap meat and now the chickens are coming home to roost.
Welcome back to the pre-antibiotic era where a cut can be deadly and hospitals can kill you. Nice job humanity!
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evolution is a bitch, i for one welcome our replacement species.
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Nice job humanity!
The human race has never had a good long game. Immediate comfort is irresistible to all animals.
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One minute you blame government, the next you say we should listen to "public health officials." I think you contradict yourself.
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One minute you blame government, the next you say we should listen to "public health officials." I think you contradict yourself.
Not a contraction at all. The government as a whole can fail the people, while individuals within the government can warn of the impending threat.
Watch Frontline's "The problem with antibiotics", there a member of the CDC, a "public official", warns about feeding antibiotics to livestock, however the CDC cannot regulate animal food, that's the FDA's role. But the FDA's hands are tied by Senators who have been corrupted by big ag's money. Hence, our government failed us because "corporations are people".
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Only if he's a Libertarian with double standards. All government is bad, because Chernobyl, in the same way that all businesses are bad, because Enron. One makes as much sense as the other.
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While I agree with your sentiment, your example is flawed. Chernobyl was a private corporation - they are an example more like Enron than like government. In fact that company still exists, and is still in business. My own government seems hellbent to sign a major nuclear procurement deal with them... because of COURSE we'll buy our nuclear reactors from the only company to ever blow one the fuck up.
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One minute you blame government, the next you say we should listen to "public health officials." I think you contradict yourself.
Not if you realize that the government officials who make the laws are not the public health officials warning about health issues. They are two totally separate groups of people. The former need to be hanged, and the latter need to be rewarded.
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Hospitals can already kill you: Medical errors now third leading cause of death in United States [washingtonpost.com]
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What is more, there are strains of resistant bacteria that are known as "nosocomial" bacteria. That word means these particular strains are found in hospitals, and pretty much ONLY in hospitals. And you can go to hospitals from coast to coast and you will find these strains in ALL of them. They've evolved to thrive in hospitals. And you can spray down the surgery with as much antiseptic as you want, and you will probably still be able to swab a little bit of it from some surface, somewhere. So yes, hospita
An abundance of caution (Score:2, Interesting)
Total Failure of Government and Society and not a good sign for the future of the human race. I personally have been well aware of the risks of Antibiotic-Resistant for over 20 years. This was the text book example of natural selection in my High School Biology class.
Instead of listening to the scientists and public health officals on the risks, we have let the greed and money in big ag run make our laws. We let them dump antibiotics in our livestock food in so we could have cheap meat and now the chickens are coming home to roost.
Welcome back to the pre-antibiotic era where a cut can be deadly and hospitals can kill you. Nice job humanity!
While what you say may be true, I disagree with your conclusions and your hindsight.
There should be no problem giving massive amounts of antibiotics to livestock. In fact, we should be giving *more*, or at least *more effective* antibiotics to livestock.
The regulatory problem wasn't from giving out too many antibiotics, it was because the regulations are so stiff that it's impossible to create new antibiotics. The fundamental flaw in the system was to make government bureaucrats responsible for risk, while
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Had that abundance of caution extended to not giving humans and livestock antibiotics that they didn't need, then we'd probably have another 20 years to develop some new antibiotics.
Not humanity. Capitalism. (Score:3)
It's not like there was a mass social movement demanding that cows be inundated with antibiotics because they're knee-deep in their own shit on a factory farm. Like climate change, asbestos or the tobacco industry, this is about profit for a handful of people.
Prevention tips (Score:1, Funny)
1) don't let the Mexicans that pick your lettuce take a shit in the patch.
2) don't fuck butts without a jimmy
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4) Stay the hell out of third world countries.
Time to try phage therapy? (Score:2)
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Proving it's safe and effective is expensive (Score:2)
if big pharma wouldn't insist on only selling patented stuff for the better of profits.
Other than through monopoly rents, how else is the advocate for a particular new treatment supposed to recoup the hundreds of millions of dollars needed to prove to the U.S. FDA that the treatment is safe and effective?
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"Such bacteria were known in China..." (Score:4, Funny)
I'm a little confused.... (Score:2)
Crop Rotation (Score:5, Interesting)
I mean: what does in benefit rather simple organisms to continue to pass along resistance to a spectrum of anti-biotic that their ancestors hadn't been exposed to in decades (and that's how many bacterial generations)? Isn't there a 'carrying capacity' or 'memory limit' to what can be added to their code that has to be slowly deprecated / de-prioritized just for physical space constraints? Asserting they have the Borg-like ability to perfectly add to their defenses without end, sounds a bit too apocalyptic to me.
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That's not a stupid question, because that's exactly how we use insecticides. I used to live in a building where the exterminator's records were posted (in the basement, behind the laundry machines, and guarded by a leopard, but nonetheless public) and you could see how they'd rotate the insecticides every six to nine months. The exact rotation period may not have been arrived at through scrupulous scientific rigor, but even the schmucks whose awful job it is to crawl through disgusting basements breathing
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Already done. The last-resort drug this patient's bacteria are resistant to, colistin, is decades old. It's only used as a last resort because it's harmful to the kidneys.
Re:Crop Rotation (Score:5, Interesting)
This is a stupid question, but I've always wondered why old (very old, unused for decades) antibacterials can't be resurrected with a restored effectiveness. I liken it to the idea of rotating crops so the field soils aren't totally stripped of nutrients by planting the same crop year after year.
It's not a stupid question at all. Frankly, people should be asking this question in case nobody thought of it. The problem is that this has actually been tried and in a lot of cases it hasn't helped. Some of the older drugs stopped being used because they were toxic or had some very undesirable possible side effects and they were replaced with drugs that were safer to the patient to use. It turns out that once bacteria start getting highly resistant that they are basically resistant to almost everything including the older drugs. We desperately need drug manufacturers to get interested in new lines of antibiotics, but due to research cost there hasn't been a lot of interest in developing new ones. And as others have pointed out given how the government seems completely and utterly disinterested in the USA (and other countries) in stopping people from giving antibiotics to livestock, we've created this mess ourselves and seem oddly uninterested in fixing it.
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My understanding is that antibiotics work by interfering with some process inside the cell, such as protein synthesis. A mutation in an enzyme may mean that the interference doesn't work any more because the antibiotic doesn't inhibit the new form. Bingo, it's resistant to that antibiotic.
Does an individual cell keep the old gene around or run the processes in parallel? I thought not, which would mean being immune to antibiotic X means it's vulnerable to Y. The problem is, we haven't discovered Y yet.
Why am I not terrified (Score:2)
Why am I not terrified in this post antibiotic world?
The end of the modern era (Score:2)
This is the beginning of the end of the modern era.
It was modern medicine - antibiotics, mainly - which allowed the advances which make modern life possible. Things like space flight, or even high capacity public transit, become untenable when the possibility of fatal bacterial strains being spread in the public: people will shun crowded, filthy public transit for fear of contracting something.
And just forget about manned space flight.
a little additional info (Score:2)
From: Oxford Journal: Clinical Infectious Diseases (Score:2)
> "Some people argue that antibiotic-resistant strains that develop in food animals are largely irrelevant to human health because E. coli strains are relatively species-specific and so will not cause disease in people. This current study [5] shows that argument is flawed."
http://cid.oxfordjournals.org/content/49/2/202.full
Re:Does vodka help? (Score:5, Funny)
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I regularly have my Russian women consume vodka before placing their proverbial lips on my appendage . . . you read it here on the internet so it must be true.
Read?
GIFs or JPGs, or it never happened.
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Topical alcohol is an excellent disinfectant, however for internal infections alcohol tends to kill the host before the bugs so not such a good idea.
Re:Does vodka help?RTFA (Score:3)
protect themselves from the superbug and from other bacteria resistant to antibiotics by thoroughly washing their hands, washing fruits and vegetables thoroughly and preparing foods appropriately.
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Sure, if you dip the entire patient in the stuff, but it would kill the patient also. Please stay out of the medical biz.
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Provided you don't drink the vodka after giving your wang a refreshing bath...
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Wouldn't strong alcohol on the glans burn like hell ? And it's no good using it only on the outside of the foreskin (in case you're American, it's this thing healthy and unmutilated penises in the rest of the world have).
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I sure as fuck don't want to be the one finding that one out.
Re: Does vodka help? (Score:2)
Agreed. Not an experiment I'll be volunteering for...
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I thought you were supposed to soak it in cider.
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they still work but because we have declared war on illegal drugs, you will probably have to go to jail for ever afterwards.
Re:Try the original antibiotic (Score:5, Insightful)
Until you turn blue.
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Sorry you are unable to follow the Google suggestion. When you learn to read before you rant you will eventually discover that the FUD about silver safety is a scam. You need to consume gallons over a long period of time to experience a change of skin color, and even then it doesn't seem to have health consequences.
When you are selling an expensive patented antibiotic and competing against less expensive OTC silver, will you spread the joy that silver is more effective? Or will you look for any way to elimi
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When you are selling an expensive patented antibiotic and competing against less expensive OTC silver, will you spread the joy that silver is more effective?
I'm not sure where you live, but here in Ontario we have a law that all prescriptions must be automatically replaced with generic versions unless otherwise specified by the physician (very rarely). And guess what? There have not been many new antibiotics discovered in the past 15 years, so the vaaaast majority prescribed are generic. We further make use of all sorts of topical antibacterial solutions containing iodine and hydrogen peroxide, for example.
In other words, if there was any validity at all to
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Silver ions are no replacement for antibiotics: they are completely indiscriminate.
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Wow, the medical woo preachers have reached /. I thought I wouldn't see the day.
OK, if you want to join the blue man group and don't mind your kidneys to shut down eventually, go for it. Wash it down with a big glass of chlorine bleach that you idiots love so much as well, just please don't use it on your kids.
Silver poisonning (Score:3)
Not life threatening but the quantity of silver required to effectivelky treat such bacterial infection may lead easily to agyria, localized or generalized. On the other hand we may get better avatar porn, so there is a, hehe , silver lining. (and now I'll slap myself silly for the easy joke).
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DumbFace [mining.com]