DailyDirt: Fighting Off Infections In The Future
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
If you haven’t heard about MSRA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) yet, it’s a strain of bacteria that can’t be killed by common antibiotic drugs. Antibiotic drugs have been over-used or mis-used in various situations, and bacteria are evolving resistance to the drugs we’ve been using for decades. Without antibiotics, healthcare would be thrust back into the dark ages. No surgeries could be done safely without antibiotics. Very common infections might kill off people regularly, instead of being the mild inconvenience that they are today. Check out these links for more info on superbugs and how we can deal with them.
- Surprisingly, we’re still finding new antibiotics in nature — like teixobactin which was found in soil-dwelling bacteria that had never been cultured before. This is a new class of antibiotic compound that bacteria don’t seem to be able to develop a resistance to. It disrupts how bacterial cell walls are made, but unfortunately, it’s only effective against certain kinds of microbes. Also, it won’t become a drug approved for human use for several years. [url]
- Thankfully, there are a few different strategies for dealing with a world that has developed bacteria resistant to all of our currently known antibiotics. We could 1) take advantage of bacteriophages (viruses that kill bacteria), 2) use bacteriocins from bacteria that already fight off microbes in nature (and modify them for our own purposes), 3) design DNA mimics that block specific bacterial genes necessary for reproduction, 4) use gene editing techniques (CRISPR) to artificially induce immunity in hosts, and there may be other tactics we haven’t yet discovered/invented… [url]
- Topic-Qx is a solution of plant materials that claims to have antibacterial properties from anti-quorum sensing compounds found in a jungle. This could be another example of a way to attack intractable bacteria, but many anti-quorum sensing compounds are hard to formulate into nice shelf-stable drugs. That’s not to say we’ll never find one that isn’t…. [url]
- Before antibiotics, one out of nine people who got a skin infection died, and three out of ten people with pneumonia didn’t survive. We already live in a post-antibiotic world of superbugs, but it would be horrible to revert back to death statistics like those before the 1940s. [url]
If you’d like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.
Filed Under: anti-quorum sensing compounds, antibacterial, antibiotics, antimicrobial, bacteriocins, bacteriophages, crispr, drugs, medicine, msra, superbugs, teixobactin, topic-qx
Comments on “DailyDirt: Fighting Off Infections In The Future”
Antibiotics are tricky stuff. Killing bacteria is actually surprisingly easy. There are any number of ways to kill every harmful bacterium in your body, guaranteed. Jumping into an incinerator, for example. This simple (if absurd) example should intuitively explain the difficulty with developing effective antibiotics.
Bacteria are living creatures, which means that antibiotics, when you get down to it, are poisons. It’s very difficult to come up with a poison that kills bacteria but doesn’t harm humans. It’s even harder to come up with a poison that kills harmful bacteria while minimizing the damage to your internal ecosystem of “gut fauna” and other helpful microbes that exist in symbiosis with you…
Re: Re:
The problem is that a bacteria that maybe harmless and even beneficial to a healthy person in moderate amounts may grow out of control in a sick person with a compromised immune system.
The problem is that sick people in hospitals tend to have much weaker immune systems than healthy people and so bacteria that are relatively harmless to healthy people and often live inside us unnoticed start to become a problem to people as they become sick and weak. Those bacteria are still not much of a threat to a healthy person.
Finally
…like teixobactin which was found in soil-dwelling bacteria …
DailyDirt lives up to its name at last.
I hope that this antibioic – or the process to extract it – isn’t locked up behind patents when we need it most.
Just use ultraviolet light to kill MRSA, works better with less harm to the patient. First hand experience, while going through chemo for Hodgkin’s Lymphoma (killed my immune system every two weeks), I developed a MRSA infection in both lower legs. After all other antibiotics failed I was admitted to the hospital for a every 12 hour, seven day course in intravenous antibiotics. At the end of the seven days the MRSA infection was reported to be cured and I was cleared to go home. Three days later the pus was oozing out of the open hole in my leg and the MRSA returned.
I did research and re-discovered ultraviolet light killed bacteria. Ultraviolet light fixtures were sold for the purpose of killing bacteria until the FDA stopped the practice by declaring them medical devices that must be certified by the FDA around 1950 or so. I found one that was originally sold by Sears in the late 1940s for sale on eBay and bought it. 40 minutes on each leg, three times a day, for five days, and the MRSA infection was gone.
Re: Re:
The FDA is a corrupt organization that has no intent of helping you out. The sad part is that most people don’t realize this.
Adaptation or Evolution
If people (scientist included) want to be straight and honest with their beliefs about life and existence we should just admit that bacteria can never be eradicated. For, unlike the dodo and other extinct species, bacterium to be eradicated we’d have to come up with a way for bacteria hosts to not be bacteria hosts. Everyone who is reasonable and sensible let’s just admit this and move on.
I up-voted Mason Wheeler’s comment, because human existence is 10% you and 90% other. We live in a symbiotic relationship with germs and other items that have their own DNA/RNA.
I’d like to take off on a tangent at this point to address the West’s view of death and dying, but no. I’ll just offer my opinion that we’ve built a life that is like a castle of sand and are blaming everything but ourselves when it crumbles into dust.