"The superbug that could render antibiotics useless just hit the US"

[mdm]

Originally Posted by brandonblt2

Remember ebola, swine flu, bird flu, and anthrax. The media blows these things up to create a story. 3 to 4 people will die from it and the next thing you know the media says there is a pandemic and that death is near.

Yes, the media tend to blow things up. Yet flu is potentially extremely dangerous, because its virus has several mechanisms to quickly mutate and also to exchange parts of genome between two different strains of the virus, if they infect the same host. (This is why flu vaccination has to be renewed yearly, not that people lose immunity, but the virus changes)


Here is how bird flu may hit us very hard. Bird flu is generally deadly, but mostly to birds because it rarely infects humans, and if it does, it usually cannot be transmitted between humans. Regular human flu, on the other hand, can be very readily transmitted between humans, but it is usually not deadly, though it is still a very serious illness.

What may happen in case of co-infection of one host (bird, pig, human, whatever) with both human and bird flu viruses, is that the bird-flu part of the genome responsible for being deadly combines with human-flu part responsible for easy transmission between humans, resulting in a virus that is both deadly and easily infects humans.

In 1918, so-called Spanish Flu killed 50-100 million of people around the world. This may happen again.


It might be even worse, as thanks to increased popumation density and air travel, diseases spread much faster than 100 years ago.

We have capability to produce vaccines now, but the process takes months. This is why the 2009 swine flu vaccination campaign was (quite stupidly) ridiculed as unnecessary, because ultimately the virus turned out to be not as deadly as feared. But the thing is you have to start vaccine production months before anyone can fully appreciate the actual risk.

What people usually don't understand how a full-blown epidemic can paralyze the society, for example by overwhelming health services (remember, doctors and nurses will become sick too). Stupid movies contribute to underestimating dangers, I forgot the title of that movie in which all those millions of infected people were immediately saved as soon as the protagonist obtained serum from a single immune monkey. This is complete BS. That might help a few, maybe a few dozen people, and that would be it.

One movie that shows with reasonable scientific accuracy how such epidemic could look like is Contagion from 2011. I highly recommend watching it.

[babydriver]

Originally Posted by Mr.ac

Yeah....
Holy shit batman where are they finding half retards to write these click bait b.s.?

To save everyone the useless 1minute read, they found one lady that could carry a the superbug. Buts it's treatable/ is being treated. That's all. The next 50 seconds worth of text is just "what if's" b.s.


Clearly click bait that targets the fears of the masses.

Not altogether click bait. This is a real problem and has been caused by [gasp] overmedication of minor infections with antibiotics. One strategy is to treat the patient with a suite of antibiotics, basically betting on the fact that they probably aren't resistant to all of them.

Drug companies are developing new formulas all the time. Surely there are new antibiotics in the works, maybe under wraps. Once there is enough long green to be made, they'll find some more miracle cures.

[babydriver]

Originally Posted by mdm

So we may be sson in a pretty deep sh*t. Say thank you to:
1. irresponsible users, who do not follow antibiotic regimes, stop their therapies eraly, or take antibiotics willy-nilly
2. irresponsible doctors, who prescribe antibiotics when they are not needed.
3. large-scale farming practicies, or more importantly lax regulation thereof, which allows using antibiotics in healthy farm animals just as a preventive measure, or because growth is faster when on antibiotics
4. capitalism, because return on investement into developing antibiotics is small. A person normally takes a few 5-day or 10-day antibiotic courses over their life, so pharma companies prefer to allocate more resources to creating drugs that you take over long period of time, often daily for a lifetime.

Absolutely correct in every respect! Well said, sir.

[babydriver]

[sato]

Originally Posted by soulreapersteve

I think you and I could become bff's.... or have a long conversation over beer.

Just say when you gonna have those drinks and I'll just drop in to say hi

[rice_classic]

I'm not too worried about things like flu etc because we don't treat those with anti-biotics (virus vs bacteria) but as for superbugs (bacteria) I think the next phase in fighting bacteria will be doing so with other (good) bacteria as opposed to anti-biotics.

[Tcoat]