The Most Dangerous Bacteria 368
An anonymous reader writes "Forbes has a story listing the six most dangerous bacteria (one's actually a fungus, but it kills people who get it half the time) that have afflicted athletes, soldiers, and hospital patients. Some scientists worry that even with a bunch of new antibiotics hitting the market, there still aren't enough and they want legislation to make it easier for companies to develop them."
Nothing can save us, we're all doomed (Score:2, Insightful)
MRSA (Score:5, Insightful)
They said that since guys rarely wash their ties, they end up carrying around bugs, ditto for labcoats. The article I read specifically mentioned MRSA*, which is one of the 6 "scary" bugs TFA mentions.
I told this to my doctor and they said that the white lab coats is a
*Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus
AKA 'Staph'
Re:Be afraid, be very, very afraid (Score:4, Insightful)
One way we could slow this down is to ban the use of anti-biotics in feed for livestock. This practice is insane, it's almost as bad as if farmers and ranchers were deliberately trying to breed anti-biotic resistant bacteria to kill people.
More Antibiotics? (Score:3, Insightful)
At least they listed E.coli (Score:3, Insightful)
A better point would be to take A Giant Rubber Mallet and Hit Up Side The Head anyone using anti-bacterial soaps, kleenex, sprays, cleaners, etc.
Just
Use
Soap
Seriously, this fad to use anti-bacterial soaps and cleansers:
a. does not work - many studies show that soap, by itself, works as well or better, and not even fancy soap at that, just basic soap
b. builds resistance to antibiotics
c. creates havoc in our streams and rivers as we flush them down our toilets, sinks, and shower/bathtubs
Now, if you want to talk Drug Resistance, I heard a fascinating seminar yesterday at the UW from Christopher Lee, on Mapping Evolutionary Pathways of HIV-1 Drug Resistance, presented by the Center for Computational Biology. He's got a website [ucla.edu] that has links to at least one of his papers. There he uses evolutionary pathways predictions of Ka/Ks to manipulate viral evolution in ways that you can either slow the drug resistance evolution or force it to evolve into a the equivalent of low-energy traps they have a hard time evolving out of.
Re:Be afraid, be very, very afraid (Score:3, Insightful)
But, you cannot donate blood in the US if you lived in Europe.
http://www.redcross.org/services/biomed/blood/sup
Of course, Europeans donate blood for Europeans, without a problem. The problem is that people in the US confuse the UK with the EU. Anybody who thinks that there had been an epidemic in the EU should compare the numbers in the entire EU, except for the UK (!), with the US. Good morning, America!
The point is, we need to get the facts right and learn from mistakes. Otherwise we end up with a situation like the one we had in the UK. For some reason beyond my comprehension it seems we are facing a lot of FUD on the one hand side and total ignorance on the other hand.
BTW the biography of Dr. Hans-Gerhard Creutzfeldt and his family is quite interesting.
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans-Gerhard_Creutzf
http://www.whonamedit.com/doctor.cfm/91.html [whonamedit.com]
Lots of information about prions has been published over the past century.
http://perso.wanadoo.fr/marcblum/PageCreutzfeld-J
http://www-micro.msb.le.ac.uk/3035/prions.html [le.ac.uk]
Different rules (Score:3, Insightful)
Beef cattle are very different. Farmers use antibiotics in them because it causes them to grow larger. This is widely considered to be a potential problem for helping to spread immunity to bacteria that can infect humans, but there aren't any good studies proving it one way or another that I'm aware of. If any studies did show up, expect a hard industry push for studies to "disprove" it and hard lobbying to stop any bills to restrict the practice.
For those who are willing to pay, organic beef does not have this problem. Most beef, though, does possess this problem.
Costly and dangerous (Score:3, Insightful)
Developing new antibiotics is very costly and can be dangerous. Recently, courts have punished drugs manufacturers with incredibly high damage awards. Take for instance the COX-2 inhibitors Vioxx. Granted, there were two (2) victims, but there is no proof that the drug actually killed them. It was simply an added risk.
A lot of antibiotics have the potential to expose their manufacturers to that kind of 8-figure lawsuits. Some of them can create kidney or liver damage and are used as "last chance" drugs. Hospitals and doctors cover their arses by requesting waivers to be signed when this kind of dangerous treatment has to be attempted, but the waivers don't include drug manufacturers, which then become the logical target.
I am the first one to think that drug companies are business, not humanitarian angels, but this is getting ridiculous. There are currently almost 10,000 (10^4) lawsuits against Merck alone [msn.com]. If only 10% of these lead to the multimillion damage payola that's becoming the norm, the company will default and its research labs will be closed down. One less avenue for new drugs, at a time where new diseases are propagating fast and old one are reappearing. Good going.
On top of that, antibiotics are extremely expensive to develop, because of the test protocols involved. There were 10 new molecules brought to the market last year. Ten. The development cost for each was several billions.
So you have a product that has ruinous R&D and makes ambulance chasers drool so much they trip over their own tongue. Is it worth it?
The answer is clear: drug companies now prefer to devote their resources to creating new lawsuit-free products such as dinosaur-shaped kid vitamins. The margins are high, the risks are low, and the lawyers are kept at bay.
So next time you hear someone diss drug companies, remind them that thanks to this kind of attitude, the next generation will have to fight deadly infections with grapefruit flavored, T-rex shaped multivitamins. That ought to cure them all right.
Disclaimer: I don't work for a drug company. But I am not getting younger, and I'd like my generation not to have to back to chewing tree bark when we're sick.
Re:Fund the academics and non-profits instead! (Score:3, Insightful)
That small step forward, presumably, includes the three years of medicinal chemistry to optimize the compound and find a suitable formulation, the seven years of clinical trails, and compiling the 250,000 page submission file for the FDA?
These days, the cost of developing a drug and getting approval for it is equivalent to the defense budget of a modest country -- say Vietnam or Syria. These procedures are well above the normal levels of academic funding. I doubt that many academics would be really interested in the tedious procedural work; the graduate students and PhDs who do most work in a research environment don't even stay long enough in these jobs to see a project like this to the end.
What academic institutions really want is to license their finds to industry, and get an (as large as possible) financial gain out of their intellectual property without having to do much more work.
A better solution would be some way to guarantuee the cost-effectiveness of the development of even rarely used drugs. Streamlined approval procedures could reduce cost; patent extensions could allow costs to be recovered over a longer period; government contracts (perhaps even on a no-cure-no-pay basis) could share some of the financial burden.
Academic institutions could take advantage from this to the same extent as "Big Pharma", levelling the playing field a bit.
Re:Wait a minute... (Score:2, Insightful)