Bacteria Becoming Resistant To Hospital Disinfectants, Warn Scientists (theguardian.com) 122
Hospitals will need to use new strategies to tackle bacteria experts have warned, after finding a type of hospital superbug is becoming increasingly tolerant of alcohol -- the key component of current disinfectant hand rubs. From a report: Handwashes based on alcohols such as isopropanol have become commonplace as a method of infection control. But while the move has been linked to benefits, including a fall in rates of hospital infections of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), new research suggests it might also have had unexpected consequences. Scientists say they have discovered that superbugs known as vancomycin-resistant enterococci, or VRE, appear to be becoming more tolerant to alcohol.
Just use methanol instead (Score:2)
If the bugs go blind, they might have more difficulties to infect us.
Re: (Score:2)
Hospitals are dangerous places... (Score:2)
LOTS of people die there..
Fair warning (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:1)
I see what you did there....
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
You may have misunderstood what they said about bleach concentration. Bleach is almost never used full strength. Rather, it is diluted to something in the neighborhood of 500-5000 ppm available chlorine. This corresponds to a 1-10% solution of household bleach. You can bump it up by adding more bleach, or acidifying the solution to reach a neutral pH.
Straight bleach is not used in a typical disinfection scenario. It is too strong. Is causes corrosion. It has fumes. (I did read that undiluted bleach is recom
Re: (Score:2)
And to add a bit more, a 1% solution of bleach is still considered pretty strong. I use a 0.15% solution for to sanitize for homebrewing. So if you have trouble with "standard strength", you still have a few orders of magnitude available. (And these percents represent the percent commercial bleach in water, not percent of hypochlorite in water. So a bottle of bleach is 100%.)
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe mix it with a strong oxidizer. NOT hydrogen peroxide, as the body uses that as a defense, but say ammonium nitrate. Nitric acid would work, but might have undesirable effects.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: not just hospitals (Score:1)
98% ipa doesn't kill stuff as effectively as weaker ipa. The gp doesn't know what he's talking about in regards to disinfecting clean rooms. Hell he's probably never been in one and only dreamed about it.
https://blog.gotopac.com/2017/05/15/why-is-70-isopropyl-alcohol-ipa-a-better-disinfectant-than-99-isopropanol-and-what-is-ipa-used-for/
Re: (Score:2)
The issue is they are not cleaning. You clean, then sanitize (or disinfect). If the surfaces are dirty, bacteria can 'hide' or be protected in the dirt. Doctors performing surgery scrub in using soap and vigorously scrub, then they use a sanitizer (or even hot water). When you wash dishes, do you just run them under hot water or do you clean them (with soap) first ?
Bacteria Becoming Resistant To Hospital Disinfecta (Score:2)
Handwashes based on alcohols such as isopropanol have become commonplace as a method of infection control.
Forget isopropanol, I'm saturating everything to whisky. You bugs can have the outside, I'm going to take care of my insides.
Is anybody surprised? We used it for everything, and now the survivors are coming back with a vengeance. (Actually just coming back immune -- anthropomorphism is for zombies.)
If only we could take the Religious Never-Evolvers and mate them with the Flat-Earthers -- then we could push them all off the edge of the Earth to be closer to God. (Or that giant turtle. Same thing. Ho
Re: (Score:2)
Tardigrades do pretty well under UV.
If they ever decide to harm humans we're in real trouble.
Re: (Score:2)
I, for one, welcome our new tardigradian overlords!
Re: (Score:2)
If they ever decide to harm humans we're in real trouble.
What would they do? Would they make us watch Star Trek - Discovery?
On second thought, that would be pretty bad.
Use bacteriophage (Score:5, Interesting)
What we need to do is find a suitable bacteriophage variant that can obliterate MRSA. It's not a permanent fix but it will buy us more time to figure out how to engineer bacteriophages. [wikipedia.org]
Bacteriophages and eventually engineered bacteriophages seem like the likely future for fighting bacterial infection. It also seems like machine learning would be a good fit for developing bacteriophage variants when resistant mutations are found.
Re: (Score:2)
Not to mention the original unwanted bacteria will evolve new defenses. This is an arms race that's been going on for nearly four billion years and one we can only hope to gain temporary advantages from. We will be fighting these contagious for our entire time in this universe.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
In nature, at least, any contagion that reproduces too quickly will ultimately kill off all the hosts. That's the nature of Ebola, so deadly that it quickly kills off a population and then runs out of hosts, and goes dormant again. So even with fast reproducing viruses, there's a limiter of one sort or another; either kill-kill-kill and then run out of hosts, or only kill a certain percentage of hosts, enough to continue propagating and evolving. But not even highly lethal viruses like Ebola kill perfectly,
Re: (Score:2)
> they get loose
Thank you. Just... thank you. I got a tear in my eye when you used 'loose' correctly.
Re: (Score:3)
But phages evolve too, so when their food starts becoming elusive, they start becoming better hunters....or, of course, change their food preferences. You could talk to the Australians about some of the downsides.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Turns out that bacteria that evolve resistance to antibiotics tend to be weak against bacteriophages, and vice versa (wish I could find a citation, sorry!). But phages tend to be narrow spectrum. Also storage of phages is already a bit tricky, so you complicate it further by needing to store a huge library of phages to address targeted bacteria.
Phage therapy is impractical on a large scale as it triggers an immune system response, and is quickly wiped from a healthy person's system. But for someone already
Re:Use bacteriophage (Score:5, Funny)
Wrong.
[On a plague of bird-eating lizards that ate all of Springfield's pigeons]
Skinner: Well, I was wrong. The lizards are a godsend.
Lisa: But isn't that a bit short-sighted? What happens when we're overrun by lizards?
Skinner: No problem. We simply unleash wave after wave of Chinese needle snakes. They'll wipe out the lizards.
Lisa: But aren't the snakes even worse?
Skinner: Yes, but we're prepared for that. We've lined up a fabulous type of gorilla that thrives on snake meat.
Lisa: But then we're stuck with gorillas!
Skinner: No, that's the beautiful part. When wintertime rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death.
Re: (Score:2)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Nothing new (Score:4, Informative)
An isopropyl alcohol bath is resoundingly insufficient to sterilize surgical instruments. This has been known for decades. Likewise, nobody in their right mind assumes a quick wipe with an alcohol pad will make your skin sterile either. Thus this news story adds nothing really new, except that some MRSA bugs may have become somewhat more resistant to a halfhearted swat of alcohol. Stop the presses...
Re: (Score:2)
An isopropyl alcohol bath is resoundingly insufficient to sterilize surgical instruments. This has been known for decades. Likewise, nobody in their right mind assumes a quick wipe with an alcohol pad will make your skin sterile either.
That's why surgeons will have to start autoclaving their hands at scrub-in.
Meanwhile, hospital administrators already have a solution: just keep raising prices until there are no more patients.
Re: (Score:2)
An isopropyl alcohol bath is resoundingly insufficient to sterilize surgical instruments. This has been known for decades. Likewise, nobody in their right mind assumes a quick wipe with an alcohol pad will make your skin sterile either.
That's why surgeons will have to start autoclaving their hands at scrub-in.
Meanwhile, hospital administrators already have a solution: just keep raising prices until there are no more patients.
What part of "scrub in" is that alcohol part?
Surgeons have done more than just dip their hands in stuff for a LONG time... Plus, when they get done scrubbing and disinfecting they put on sterile gloves.
Don't get me started on the sterilization of the incision site before draping in sterile cloth to create a sterile field to work in... And this is what I can divine from being in the operating room during my first kid's delivery and how I was instructed about what I could and couldn't touch.
Re: (Score:3)
> An isopropyl alcohol bath is resoundingly insufficient to sterilize surgical instruments If this has been known for decades could you please post a link to some reliable paper showing this. Because I don't believe you.
Medical sterilization of instruments has not been done in an alcohol bath for ages except as a last resort. It's marginally better than nothing, but not by much.
Current sterilization processes involve high heat in autoclaves (Basically pressure cookers) for items that can take the heat. There are some ozone processes that don't use pressure and heat that's effective and many one-time use items are sterilized using radiation after sealed in their packaging. Using alcohol or just boiling in water even would
Re: (Score:3)
There are things for which boiling water is their normal environment. Most of them don't specialize in infecting humans, but this doesn't mean they can't pass around their plasmids to those that do.
That said, boiling water is generally a good way to throughly wash something. Exceptions are when something is really baked on. Unfortunately, a very small exception can carry a simply huge number of bacteria. When I was an assistant in a biochem lab I sometimes washed glassware. The drill was, first you was
Re: (Score:2)
We used to use Hexane, then DCM, then ethanol for removing contaminants from lab equipment.
I always liked rinsing glassware with concentrated nitric acid and then adding a little ethanol which was recommended in one of the chemistry handbooks. Unfortunately under just the right conditions, it goes *foomp* and launches the entire corrosive mixture onto the ceiling.
Re: (Score:1)
There's no guarantee that submerging something in boiling water exposes all parts to that boiling water. Cracks, crevices and hinges can be relatively safe harbours.
That's the reason for autoclaves. The higher heat and pressure penetrates more thoroughly.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
there's something that can survive boiling in water?
The prion (protein) which causes Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease survives autoclave sterilization [wikipedia.org] as some very unfortunately surgical patients discovered.
Re: (Score:1)
The word "kill" for bacteria circulates because of marketing.
The best way to "anything" a bacteria is to slough the supporting substances. A sponge doesn't magically purify dishes, it just ablates them. Removes the stains and layers and deposits that host growth. We're in this situation because we sold appeal on using "holy and sanctifying" products, as if the crud on your hands merely needs to be "sanitized". See how well that shit works after working on a car engine.
Parent, your point was correct, but the
Steam vapor cleaners (Score:2)
This doesn't solve the hand wash problem, but I think hospitals should try cleaning with a steam vapor cleaner [wikipedia.org]. An industrial-quality steam cleaner is not that expensive, and it just takes water and electricity to run. And I don't think there are many germs that can survive temperatures higher than the boiling point of water.
Industrial steam cleaners can reach temperatures of over 340 degrees F (171 degrees C) inside their boilers, but what matters is the temperature of the steam when it exits the cleanin
Re: (Score:2)
You'd think that, but you'd be wrong. 30 minutes at 375 (celcius) is required to confidently kill MRSA
I always welcome corrections; I'd rather learn the truth than continue to believe something mistaken. However, I just did a Google search and I have not found a reference to support the above numbers.
Could you please provide a link documenting your numbers?
Here's an article about a test using a commercial steam vapor cleaner. I'm having trouble understanding it... the conclusion is that a steam vapor clea
Re: (Score:1)
375C is hot enough to melt lead! And likely melt/destroy a few other important materials as well. Maybe surgical implements are made to hold up to these temperatures but that's got to be brutal on equipment.
According to Princeton an autoclave is used at 121C (250F) for 30 minutes.
https://ehs.princeton.edu/book/export/html/380
I believe you got your C and F confused.
Re: (Score:2)
And I don't think there are many germs that can survive temperatures higher than the boiling point of water. There are plenty, google "thermophyls" (or something spelled similar :D )
Re: (Score:2)
Bacteria create their own shelter called biofilm. Mature biofilms can withstand temperatures in autoclaves so "cleaning" surgical tools or similar items in autoclaves is often not sufficient.
Re: (Score:3)
If I'm understanding the abstract correctly, this study showed that three seconds of hot steam was 99.95% effective at killing biofilm. "Compared with chemical disinfection, steam treatment for <1 second a similar level of biofilm disinfection as provided by incubation with 10-ppm sodium hypochlorite (bleach) for 10-20 minutes of contact time."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22418602/ [nih.gov]
The above study tested a particular brand of commercial steam vapor cleaner ("Ladybug") with a feature called "TANCS"
Re: (Score:2)
It seems like they may have chosen 10-ppm simply as a dramatic comparison. Such a low concentration corresponds to 3 mL bleach in a gallon of water if I calculated correctly. Nobody uses such a low concentration except to sanitize water itself.
Re: (Score:3)
Hospitals in most cases have long since moved to "one-time-use" tools for surgery and that's the end of it. The used stuff is bagged and shipped for destruction and new medical tools made. That means even if you have clean tools, someone fucking up during their wash can transfer it to a patient. Even day-to-day items are pretty much use once-throw away, simply because the transmission possibility is way too high. The problem with MRSA is that it can thrive on surfaces, hands, and so on. It can thrive th
Doctor House says... (Score:3)
Whatever's not done already:
1. Find out how various disinfectants work at the cellular level.
2. Select 3 or 4 different ones that are otherwise fairly safe, but that operate in very different ways.
3. Mix them into a new product.
4. Use it.
See, simultaneous adaptation across multiple (say, four) different sterilization vectors (this would work for internal antibiotics too) is like throwing down four poles onto an adaptation space and hope they all form an octopus x on the same point.
Invent a new, use until it doesn't work, repeat, is a failure mode. You are literally doing the best optimal way to make germ killers be useless as fast as possible.
Re: (Score:3)
This is the same BS that happened with penicillin etc.
Yeah, if you give every single farm animal half a dose per day, everything is going to grow resistant.
What a bunch of bullshit.
Farmers aren't as stupid as you think. They know bacteria can get resistance to antibiotics if they are overused. I grew up on a farm and we used antibiotics fairly regularly, but far from daily. Pigs would get a shot of antibiotics when they were brought off the truck into the confinement building. They wouldn't get another shot unless one got sick, and only that one pig would be separate from the rest and get a shot. If the pig improved then it would be returned to the pen wi
Re: (Score:2)
Nonsense. Maybe you grew up on some kind of granola organic farm.
Animals in this country have routinely been given feed that is laced with antibiotics because it makes them gain weight faster. You should know that.
Re: (Score:2)
No, I'm talking about antibiotics specifically added to increase weight gain.
They are gradually trying to curtail this, but until recently it has been very common. In particular, the GP claim that "when I grew up, cows only got one shot of antibiotics in their life!" is simply disingenuous.
Re: (Score:2)
Give it up already.
Re: (Score:2)
This...
I'm a farm boy and I can attest this is pretty much true. Antibiotics are not generally routine, but special occasion things, used when the health of the animal is open to question or could possibly be compromised by some necessary procedure. Antibiotics are expensive and it takes labor to administer them, so they are not used indiscriminately. Farmers don't have money to waste.
Testing of milk is done by the truck load too. When the truck arrives at the farm, they take samples for testing. When t
Re: (Score:2)
When I worked at a dairy bottling plant, I once overheard an argument between the chemist, who said the milk didn't pass the test, and a manager, who said it could be re-pasteurized and made into chocolate milk. Based on what I saw them using to make chocolate milk (like milk from bottles th
Re: (Score:2)
The issue is that people are also made of organic matter.
No matter how effective it is, I won't wash my hands with a flamethrower.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I have a plan (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The Chevron brand seems to work as well.
for what it's worth (Score:2)
When do we admit that hospitals are the problem? (Score:2)
Maybe concentrating all the sick people in one place creates a perfect breeding ground for this stuff.
Yes, yes, there are valid economic reasons for maximizing the work output of doctors, who are exceedingly expensive to mint. But at some point, the downfall of our species might just be more costly.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
This is why we need more science education (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
vancomycin-resistant enterococci (Score:2)
And who do we have to blame for this state off affairs?
Why the poultry industry of course who decided it was a good idea to use a last line human defense anti-biotic to reduce the gut bacteria of chickens so they would grow faster.
So there is a consequences of us allowing these cunts to be cunts to the humble chicken.
Re: (Score:2)
I'll take "things that never happened" for $590, Alex.
Detection of Vancomycin-Resistant Enterococcus Spp. (VRE) from Poultry [researchgate.net]
Persistence of Vancomycin-Resistant Enterococci in New Zealand Broilers after Discontinuation of Avoparcin Use [asm.org]
BENEFITS OF DIETARY ANTIBIOTIC AND MANNANOLIGOSACCHARIDE SUPPLEMENTATION FOR POULTRY [psu.edu] which says: The specific vanA gene cluster that encodes for vancomycin resistance has been isolated from Enterococcus faecium in farm animals destined for human consumption (Bates et al., 1994; Klare et al., 1995).
Wash your hands (Score:1)
Looks like we're going to have to start washing our hands after we've been to the toilet. The number of people who don't do this is frightening. It's not just that your hand has touched your dick or your vag or whatever, it's that you're not washing your hands at all during the day, then preparing food or eating with your hands, or touching door handles that others have touched, or coughed into your hand, or let the dog lick your hand etc. People who don't wash their hands after going to the toilet should b
No shit (Score:3)
Infection control in about every hospital I've set foot in in the last 14 years will tell you hand sanitizer doesn't do shit for VRE - wash your hands.
Alarmist nonsense (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Deadly Romanian scandal (Score:2)
This reminds me of a big scandal in Romania involving a firm called Hexi Pharma who was the major distributor of dissinfectants to all .ro hospitals.
They were found to dillute the cleaning substances so they sell more to the hospitals in the last 10 years or so.
This of course coincides in time with the situation described in TFA. ...
Just stop with the alcohol (Score:2)