antibiotics

I've discussed before how the misdiagnosis of viral infections, typically respiratory illnesses, leads to massive improper use of antibiotics. It's a problem in the UK too. From ScripNews (subscription only): Antibiotics are prescribed to treat up to 80% of cases of sore throat, otitis media, upper respiratory tract infections and sinusitis in England and Wales, even though official guidance advises against this, a study published in the Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy has revealed. The study was undertaken on behalf of the specialist advisory committee on antimicrobial resistance (…
One time I was watching a football game on TV and they had a short quiz, called "You make the call" or something like that, and you had to watch a play and pretend to be a referee. A short video clip showed football players falling over each other. Then you were three possible calls that a refereee might make and asked to chose which was correct. After the commercial, the announcer would tell you which choice was right and explain why it was correct. I suppose this was a trick to make us watch the commercials, but I thought the game was kind of fun. My SciBling "Mike the Mad" had a great…
One of the things that's hammered into your head as a baby scientist is the importance of running controls. Typically, you run a positive control--a 'gamed' experiment where you know what the outcome should be and which tells you that the experiment is working--and a negative control which should not give any results at all (e.g., a PCR reaction without any DNA) to make sure there's no contamination or other spurious results. It's always puzzled me why people don't like to run controls because if you don't do the controls, you'll have to redo the experiment, which is a lot more work than if…
...the signal peptide? Interesting. I'll start at the beginning. One of the few bright spots regarding the problem of antibiotic resistance is that resistance typically infers a fitness cost to the bacterium, at least initially. In other words, the resistant strain usually grows slower than a nearly identical sensitive strain*. While compensatory mutations can lower or eradicate this 'cost of resistance', it is thought that resistance can't increase initially without favorable selective conditions--antibiotic use--due to the cost of resistance. We'll need a little background about…
MRSA is coming! Run for your lives! ....this little piggy had MRSA up its nose. A recent study from the Netherlands found that 39% of slaughtered pigs carried MRSA. This is particularly surprising since MRSA rates in hospitals in the Netherlands are remarkably low. Even in the U.S., the commensal MRSA frequency in humans is around 1.5%. What's up with the piggies? Here's the abstract; some additional comments afterwards: Recently methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) was isolated from pigs and pig farmers in The Netherlands. In order to assess the dissemination of MRSA in…
Well, Dobzhansky actually said, "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution", but, as I've mentioned before, there's a lot to be learned from the sociopolitcal controversy surrounding evolutionary biology. Over at Pandagon, Amanda writes about Ross Douthat's ridiculous claim that those who favor legal and safe abortion are eugenicists (italics mine): Anti-choicers who engage the "OHMIGOD EUGENICS" argument are advancing what might be the classic bad faith argument. They're not interested in stopping eugenics so much as creating a wedge issue that will cause liberals to…
A colleague has told me about some interesting data that people are far less likely to request an antibiotic for a chest cold than for bronchitis even though they're the same thing. With that in mind, here's something from the archives. One cause of the evolution of antibiotic resistance is the inappropriate use of antibiotics in clinical practice. A recent study concluded that antibiotic therapy did not result in eliminate bronchitis any faster than not using the antibiotic: A study found that bronchitis sufferers who are otherwise healthy do not get better any faster by taking antibiotics…
While lots of people swear by the power of tea, I had no idea it was seriously viewed as a something that led to urbanization. From The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson (p. 94-95): The dramatic increase of people to populate the new urban spaces of the Industrial Age may have had one other cause: tea. The population growth during the first half of the eighteenth century neatly coincided with the mass adoption of tea as the de facto national beverage. (Imports grew from six tons at the beginning of the century to eleven thousand at the end.) A luxury good at the start of the century, tea had…
Since I haven't discussed antibiotic resistance for a while, I want to put that health problem in context. The CDC estimates that every year, over 60,000 U.S. residents die from a hospital-acquired bacterial infection that is resistant to one or more commonly used antibiotics. Roughly 25,000 per year die from bacterial infections resistant to three or more antibiotics (e.g., MRSA). And that's just the infections you catch in the hospital. For a little perspective, HIV/AIDS kills under 18,000 U.S. residents per year. Antibiotic resistance is a serious, albeit neglected, problem. Onto the…
The title is self-explanatory. From digby: When the TB guy story was blazing I wrote that one of the most annoying things about it was that the guy said he was willing to put god knows how many other people at risk because he believed that he would die in a European hospital and had to get back to America where the health care was good. Aside from it being a thoroughly selfish act, it was just wrong. He would have had fine care in that Italian hospital and he could have arranged for transportation back to the states without endangering the lives of of all those strangers many of whom might…
Calling all woo-meisters (including ScienceBlogs Lord High Defender Against Woo). In this Slate article about the vaccines-cause-autism crowd, which describes how this is one idiot idea that will never go away, I came across this puzzling statement about antibiotics: Another apparent benefit is the notion, espoused by a network of alternative-medical practitioners and supplement pushers, that if vaccines are the cause, the damage can be repaired, the child made whole. In the homes of autistic children it is not unusual to find cabinets filled with 40 different vitamins and supplements, along…
You might have heard about the FDA detention of Chinese seafood because it contains antibiotic residues. I'll have more to say about that later, but there's another food advisory that puzzles me: The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is warning consumers not to eat Veggie Booty flavor of snack food, marketed by Robert's American Gourmet, due to possible contamination with Salmonella Wandsworth, bacteria that cause gastrointestinal illness. Why would you eat food called Veggie Booty? What was your first clue that this might be a bad idea? Veggie Booty.
Anything that lowers the non-therapeutic use of antibiotics in agriculture is a good way to prevent the spread of antibiotic resistance. Fromt he NY Times: Tyson Foods, one of the nation's largest poultry producers, said yesterday that it would no longer use antibiotics to raise chicken sold fresh in stores and would start a $70 million advertising campaign to promote the shift. The company said that fresh chicken raised without antibiotics was shipped to stores Monday and would be sold beginning later this week in packaging that emphasizes there are no artificial ingredients. "We're…
Here's a disturbing paper: "Can methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus be found in an ambulance fleet?" The answer? Yes. From the abstract: OBJECTIVE: To perform an initial screening study of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) contamination in an ambulance fleet. METHODS: This was a cross-sectional study of MRSA contamination in an ambulance fleet operating in the western United States in June 2006. Five specific areas within each of 21 ambulances (n = 105) were tested for MRSA contamination using dacron swabs moistened with a 0.85% sterile saline solution. These…
The misuse of cefquinome has been a pet peeve of mine. Well, I have a commentary in ASM's Microbe about this topic: "Cefquinome: when Regulation Collides with Biology." It might be boring because I don't use, erm, colorful, blogtopian language, but it still might interest you.
I like much of Matt Yglesias' writing. But he still doesn't appreciate how science and evolution affect public policy issues. As many of you know, three out of ten Republican presidential candidates stated that they don't believe in evolution at one of the presidential debates. Yglesias comments on Huckabee's response: I see that Jamie Kirchick didn't care for the reply at all: "Sorry, but if someone believes in fairy tales, I think that's pretty relevant to their qualifications as president." But why? The core of Huckabee's answer is here: It's interesting that that question would even…
What do we know about transmission of tuberculosis on an airplane? Not much, apparently. There is very little literature on it and not a single case of active TB has ever been traced to an airplane contact. On the other hand, it isn't very easy to estimate the risks. The only way you can do it is in cases such as the current one where you know someone with TB got on an airplane and potentially exposed others. Then you would do intensive follow-up of fellow passengers and crew to see if you could find others who might have gotten infected. Now the problems really start. First, there's the task…
We know that the burden of mortality of seasonal influenza falls mainly on the older population but also can kill children and infants. In 2004 CDC started the Influenza-Associated Pediatric Mortality Surveillance System, itself part of a larger notifiable disease system. Its aim was to find out more about the pattern of influenza deaths in children. It is now bearing fruit. A recent surprise was the subject of a CDC Health Advisory, its middle level of broadcast health alerts: From October 1, 2006 through May 7, 2007, 55 deaths from influenza in children have been reported to CDC from 23…
From Monday to Friday, I attended the American Society for Microbiology meeting held in Toronto. Before I get to some of the interesting science, my apologies to all of the people who suggested we meet up. Unfortunately, I never look at the blog (or almost never) while I'm on the road, so I missed your messages (it's best to email me directly). Anyway, here's the list of random things: The E. coli responsible for the spinach outbreak is found in many feral swine. Hence, feral swine are a possible reservoir of E. coli O157:H7. Of course, feral pigs roaming around California in significant…
A couple of weeks ago, after I posted about a very serious emerging bacterial threat, KPC, I received an email from a reader with an elderly relative in the hospital with a very serious case of pneumonia caused by KPC. What he* told me is shocking. The relative, who has had repeated hospital stays and a previous MRSA infection, was in the hospital for a week before any laboratory cultures were performed. That's right, a patient with practically every major risk factor for a multidrug resistant infection wasn't tested for a week. So this patient wasn't isolated, exposing other ICU patients and…