Antibiotic Resistance - A serious Issue facing us all.

[Bouncer]

This is becoming a very very big problem around the world for everyone. More people are dieing from infections from bacteria that was once easily treatable with common antibiotics.

This is a much bigger problem facing us all compared to something like ebola..

Basically, if you get an infection today, the chances of finding an antibiotic to fight it is becoming increasingly harder to find. The bacteria are evolving and developing defense mechanisms that are rendering antibiotics useless.

We've been ignorant about the use of antibiotics and dealing with bacteria in general. If you use antibacterial soap around the house you are an idiot and part of the problem. You have an immune system for a reason, let it work. Just like a muscle.. if you don't train it, it will get weak.

Antibiotic resistance began before discovery of penicillin, DNA from First World War shows - Telegraph

[blm]

If you want an immune system workout have some kids and send them to school. Holy fuck. I've been sick more this year then I have in the last decade. No exaggeration.

[lipripper]

I have very rarley taken antis in my life. I have a pretty strong imune system hardly ever get..sick..colds etc. Never take flu shots. When I was in the Army I had to take them and would get sick every year after taking it..

I believe they are prescribed way to often

[FitnessBrat]

It's not a secret that antibiotics are over-prescribed. But they are also a necessity for fighting off certain illnesses and bacteria. People need to take better charge of their own health, as well.

[Herc]

Wash your hands ya dirty mofos.:panic:

[redback]

I would be dead a few times over if it weren't for antibiotics. They are still saving countless lives.

[TKD]

I don't even want to think what would have happened to my younger son without antibiotics. 3 years straight he has contracted pneumonia. 2 times bacterial and one of those times he had been ambulanced to children's hospital. Obviously with my wife being a nurse we watch him carefully first until it's obvious his body is losing. Other than those cases of pneumonia he has been perfectly healthy. And to throw in the last important detail, he has always been vaccinated.

[Bouncer]

I would be dead a few times over if it weren't for antibiotics. They are still saving countless lives.

That's exactly the point. Can you imagine a world without effective antibiotics? We are heading in that direction with an ever increasing rate of bacterial resistance.

[Bouncer]

MICROBES ARE THE silent assassins of the human world. They’re everywhere: Scientists have identified microbial DNA of all sorts in our homes and on the subway, from innocuous bugs to scary ones like Legionnaires and plague. But bacteria have to beware their own predators, too: a special class of viruses called phages.

Though they’re the most abundant and diverse organisms on Earth, scientists have had a hard time studying phages, which attack by inserting their genetic material into bacteria. Now, researchers have unearthed 12,500 new viruses in one go—the largest-ever addition to the viral family tree—by mining the genetic sequences of those unsuspecting microbial hosts. And they’re getting ready to add a whole lot more.

Scientists have known about viruses that attack bacteria since the early twentieth century. In 1917, Felix d’Herelle, a French-Canadian microbiologist, and his colleagues successfully isolated phages that kill bacteria like E. coli, salmonella, and dysentery, and doctors used his so-called phage therapies to treat disease. But phage research lost steam in the 1950s in the face of penicillin and other powerful new antibiotics.

With the surge of microbiome research, scientists have begun to acknowledge phages’ enormous impact on microbial communities and by extension, the environment. Microbes critically cycle nutrients like carbon, sulfur, and nitrogen through ecosystems. But phages can bring all that activity to a screeching halt. A particularly ambitious phalanx of phages in a bacterial ocean community can kill up to half of its microbes in one day. “In any environment we look, viruses are playing an important role in killing cells, moving genes around, or changing the metabolism of the cell,” says Matthew Sullivan, one of the microbiologists who discovered the new phages.

Despite their abundance, phages are really hard to study. Like microbes, they need to be nurtured in Petri dishes before microbiologists can study them. But lots of bacteria can’t be grown in a lab—the conditions aren’t similar enough to their home environments—and the same is true with phages.

Full Story: Scientists Unearth a Trove of New Bacteria-Killing Viruses | WIRED

[Bouncer]

Half of Bugs That Cause Infections After Surgery are Antibiotic Resistant

Antibiotic Resistant Bugs Cause Many Deaths After Surgery

Bacteria are getting good at fighting back against antibiotics—and that could be dangerous for our health

We’ve been hearing the warnings for a while now: bacteria are cleverly evading the best antibiotics that we can throw at them, and that means trouble. We’ve seen it with MRSA strains and increasingly with C. difficile infections that are common in hospitals. It means infections that normally would clear up with a short course of drugs may no longer be controlled, and that for some infections, there may simply be no medications left that are strong enough to battle the bacteria at all.

That’s certainly not a welcome scenario when it comes to strep throat or sinus infections. But it could be life threatening for infections after surgery and for cancer patients on chemotherapy, whose immune systems are dramatically weaker.

Reporting in The Lancet Infectious Diseases, researchers say that 39% to 51% of bugs that cause infections after surgery are already resistant to standard antibiotics. They also calculated what would happen if current trends of increasing resistance continued, and found that a 30% increase could lead to an estimated 120,000 more infections and 6,000 additional deaths a year in the U.S.

Those are sobering numbers, and while the scientists focused on hospitals, where the trend is most easily studied, the invisible threat lurks not just there but everywhere—in schools, gyms, homes and anywhere people and pathogens co-exist.

Ramanan Laxminarayan, director of the Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics & Policy, led a team of researchers that collected data from previous studies on using antibiotics to prevent infections in 10 common surgeries and in cancer chemotherapy. Often, before procedures such as Cesarean section, prostate biopsy, colon surgery or hip replacements, patients are given antibiotics to protect them from getting infections while they recover. There’s good reason for the practice. Laxminarayan found that rates of infection at the surgery site were nearly three times lower among those getting the pre-emptive antibiotics: 4% compared to 11% for those not receiving the drugs. For cancer patients, taking antibiotics prior to chemotherapy reduced risk of infections by 35%.

But when they investigated the infections that did occur, they found that nearly 40% of those following cesareans were caused by resistant microbes and 50% to 90% of infections after prostate biopsies were due to resistant bugs. Among cancer chemotherapy patients, 27% of infections could be traced to antibiotic-resistant agents.

“This is a problem that really affects all of us,” says Laxminarayan. “Nearly everything we think of as modern medicine depends in some way, shape or form on effective antibiotics. If antibiotics are less effective, as they are progressively getting these days, then that has consequences for things like surgeries that people commonly get.”

Reversing the trend won’t be easy, but it starts with relatively low-tech changes. Improving infection control measures in hospitals, which include more handwashing and better surveillance and tracking of infections once they occur, are key. Ensuring that doctors and technicians are also trained properly in wound care to keep surgical wounds clean and free of microbes can also help. Increasing doctor and patient education about when antibiotics are appropriate is also critical. Despite the fact that antibiotics are only effective against bacterial infections, one recent study showed that 38% of patients with the flu—which is caused by a virus—were prescribed antibiotics at hospitals or clinics. Another study showed that among patients admitted to the hospital, a third received antibiotics for no discernible reason. They did not show signs of infection, which can include fever or abnormal immune cell counts.

“It seems like an evergreen problem, but it has really gotten worse in the last five to six years,” says Laxminarayan. While the study does suggest an alarming scenario of thousands more deaths if microbes continue to become more resistant, he says that with more awareness of the scope of the problem, that scary trend can be reversed. “If the antibiotics are 30% more effective, then we can avert 6,—000 deaths and 120,000 infections,” he says.

[Bouncer]

Meat industry ignores FDA, health experts, buys more antibiotics | Ars Technica

Despite recent efforts by health experts, doctors, and the Food and Drug Administration to pull the meat industry away from its heavy use of antimicrobials, livestock producers seem to have dug in their heels.

From 2009 to 2014, the amount of antimicrobials sold and distributed for use in livestock increased by 22 percent, according to an FDA report released Thursday. Of the antimicrobials sold in 2014, 62 percent were related to drugs used in human health, also called medically important. From 2009 to 2014, sale and distribution of medically important antimicrobials used on farms also jumped—an increase of 23 percent.

That brings the 2014 total of antimicrobials sold for US livestock to 15,358,210 kilograms, including 9,475,989 kilograms of medically important drugs, according to the report.

In 2013, researchers estimated that agriculture and aquaculture take in about 80 percent of all antibiotics (which are technically a subset of antimicrobials, but they are sometimes used synonymously) sold in the US.

The new data comes amid calls for responsible use of antimicrobials and antibiotics—in clinics as well as farms. Last month, the American Academy of Pediatrics called on livestock producers to curb overuse of drugs on farms. Much of the tonnage of drugs go to illness prevention on factory farms rather than treatments for sick animals. And producers sometimes use the drugs because they help animals fatten up. Such overuse, the doctors argued, is fueling the development of antimicrobial resistance among microbes, which in turn can cause difficult-to-treat infections in people, particularly vulnerable children.
In 2013, the FDA introduced voluntary guidelines to phase out using antimicrobials to boost animal growth, cut back on other uses, and consult veterinarians when antimicrobials are used. (Unlike antibiotics approved for human use, many antimicrobials used in animals are sold over the counter).

But the FDA’s guidelines appear to have had little to no impact so far. Sale of animal antimicrobials increased by four percent from 2013 to 2014, while use of medically important antimicrobials increased by three percent, according to the new report.

In a statement, Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-NY) said, “This report demonstrates what I have been saying for years: that FDA’s policies have been toothless in the face of the continued, widespread misuse of life-saving antibiotics in factory farms... The increased use of antibiotics over the last year is particularly disgraceful.”

The Congresswoman, a microbiologist by training, called on the FDA to immediately prohibit the use of medically important antimicrobials on farms.

In an interview with Reuters, Ron Phillips, spokesman for the Animal Health Institute, defended the meat industry, saying, "Sales does not equal use and use is not the same thing as resistance." The Animal Health Institute represents animal drug companies.

[TrapsBrah]

Bouncer call me a conspiracy nut but most people die from chemo and cancer "treatments" and rarely from the cancer itself.

[blm]

That's a very inaccurate statement.

[Turbo3000]

"Sales does not equal use and use is not the same thing as resistance." The Animal Health Institute represents animal drug companies

I'll agree that sales do not equal use, but Use, especially abuse causes resistance.

Microorganism warfare.

Every patient today that goes and cries to their doctor about a runny nose and sore throat that leaves with an antibiotic prescription is also part of the problem.

[TrapsBrah]

That's a very inaccurate statement.

Chemo kills people and that's a fact.

Cancertutor.com