The Time To Prepare Is Now
Seems the ancient Druids new about the healing powers of this location, and now we know as well:
Researchers analysing soil from Ireland long thought to have medicinal properties have discovered that it contains a previously unknown strain of bacteria which is effective against four of the top six superbugs that are resistant to antibiotics, including MRSA.
Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2018-12-bacteria-ancient-irish-soil-halts.html#jCp
The article at Reuters says that in some countries resistance is already insanely high, and predicted to get worse:
In low and middle-income countries, drug resistance is high and projected to grow rapidly. In Brazil, Indonesia and Russia, for example, between 40 percent and 60 percent of infections are already drug resistant, compared to an OECD average of 17 percent, and AMR rates are forecast to grow between 4 and 7 times faster than the OECD average between now and 2050.
They suggest the following to get on top of the problem:
Every government should be promoting the fact that doctors giving antibiotics to people who don’t need them could kill us.
Wired have an article on this, and it highlights the likelihood of farms being a major contributor to antibiotic resistance.
Outside of experimental conditions, it’s never been possible to prove that this antibiotic given to that animal gave rise to this bacterium that ended up in that human. But this new work dives so deeply into the genomics of bacterial adaptation in food animals and humans, it proves the link that ag would rather deny.
Among the many strains they found was one known as H22, which was present on chicken meat and in people, and carried genetic markers indicating it had occupied the guts of poultry first, and then adapted to humans.
Staphylococcus epidermidis has evolved in Australia to be resistant to two unrelated, major antibiotics. It seems to be heading the way of Europe where it is resistant to all antibiotics.
The current guideline for treating infections uses a combination of these two major antibiotics because they have been thought to protect one another against developing resistance.
https://www.sbs.com.au/news/new-drug-resistant-superbug-spreading-in-victorian-hospitals
Having an operation is becoming more and more of a risk.
Finnish and British researchers swabbed trays at the Helsinki Airport and discovered that half of the samples were contaminated with rhinovirus or adenovirus—two categories of common viruses that can trigger cold-like symptoms.
http://mentalfloss.com/article/556466/bins-at-airport-security-are-incredibly-dirty-germs
This type of news is provocative, but it needs to be put in perspective. Anything that lots of people touch all day, and isn’t regularly cleaned, is like this. Door handles. Pay phones. Fuel pumps at gas stations. It is just the nature of things.
And they’ll say “worse than public toilets”. That’s because public toilets get cleaned a lot.
These germs are not airborne. You need to ingest them to potentially get sick. When someone sneezes or coughs into the air, and you are close by, that is how.
Otherwise, feel free to touch all of those germ-riddled surfaces, just don’t put your fingers in your mouth, or on food, without washing them first. Basic stuff.
Read the opening paragraph at Wired.com’s article and wonder why the news hasn’t been more widespread. To my mind this is one of the greatest risks modern civilisation will face this century….
A PATHOGEN THAT resists almost all of the drugs developed to treat or kill it is moving rapidly across the world, and public health experts are stymied how to stop it.
By now, that’s a familiar scenario, the central narrative in the emergence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. But this particular pathogen isn’t a bacterium. It’s a yeast, a new variety of an organism so common that it’s used as one of the basic tools of lab science, transformed into an infection so disturbing that one lead researcher called it “more infectious than Ebola” at an international conference last week.
Known as Candida auris and only discovered less than a decade ago, it has now spread to 27 countries.
Not well-known is why humans develop fevers. It is due to our high operating temperature, something believed to have evolved to stop fungal infections in their tracks. Mammals get the infections way less than other species.
It is possible that Candida auris is the reason – we evolved a high temperature to stop it wiping us out.
And now it is back, itself evolved to live at lower temperatures, and we have little or no defence if it keeps evolving like most superbugs do. Up to 60% mortality. Hospital outbreaks lasting a year…
If you are thinking it is rare and foreign, there have been 300+ cases in the USA so far, across 11 states.
It is a prion disease, like mad cow disease…
Deer across North America are dying from a mysterious disease that gradually destroys the animals’ nervous systems.
An animal infected with the disease can live two years before signs of symptoms — such as a vacant stare, thick saliva, exposed ribs or drooping heads — become visible.
…sick animals and cadavers can spread prions through plants and soil, which could be coated with deformed proteins for years, perhaps even decades.
…macaque monkeys who ate infected deer contracted the disease, the first time the disease was shown to spread to a primate through meat.
No need for commentary, these are the ones to worry about, from New Scientist, republished here.
These are the diseases the World Health Organization thinks we should find remedies for, fast. The first six are its highest priority.
Lassa fever
This West African virus, carried by the common Natal multimammate rat, infects 300,000 people a year. Most have no symptoms, but it can cause diarrhoea and vomiting, then internal fluid accumulation, bleeding from orifices, shock, seizure and coma. It kills some 5000 people annually. Initial symptoms resemble other local diseases, making diagnosis tricky – one reason West Africa was slow to spot Ebola.
Nipah
This bat virus started killing people in 1999 in Malaysia after pig farms were built near fruit bats, which dropped half-eaten fruit into pigsties. People get it from pigs and bats, but it can also spread between humans. Nipah breaks out sporadically in and around densely populated Bangladesh, causes inflammation of the brain and has a high fatality rate.
Rift Valley fever
Widespread across Africa, this virus invaded the Arabian Peninsula in 2000, and could go further. It mainly infects cattle and is spread by mosquitoes; people can get it from mosquito bites or by eating infected beef. Symptoms are usually mild but it can cause haemorrhagic fever, which kills in half of cases.
SARS, MERS and emerging coronaviruses
These related bat viruses infect a range of mammals and have already emerged in humans twice, resulting in severe pneumonia: SARS in 2003 and MERS in 2014. Both spread from human to human.
Crimean-Congo haemorrhagic fever
Found across Africa, Asia and south-east Europe, the virus is invading new territory as its tick hosts capitalise on global warming. It appeared in western Europe in 2010. Infected people generally have a mild fever but some strains cause severe haemorrhagic disease, with bleeding internally and from orifices, from which 30 per cent of people die.
Chikungunya
A virus spread by Aedes mosquitoes between monkeys and small mammals in East Africa, Chikungunya started causing large epidemics around 2000 and exploded into Asia in 2005, after mutations made it better adapted to a new mosquito host. In 2014, it invaded the Americas and has occurred in Europe. It rarely kills but causes debilitating joint pains, which can persist for months.
Zika
A monkey virus that has infected humans in Africa and Asia for decades, Zika suddenly entered the Americas in 2013. In 2015, it was linked to a wave of severe birth defects including microcephaly. Companies are already working on vaccines but the WHO wants extra research into the virus’s effects on fetal brains.
Severe fever with thrombocytopenia syndrome
Flies under the radar – possibly because of its name. The virus, discovered in 2011, can cause fever and multi-organ failure, killing 12 per cent of people it infects. It has been found in east Asia, seems to be carried by farm animals, and is spread by ticks. A nearly identical virus, called heartland, has turned up in the US.
Novel agent
Given the rate at which previously unknown or obscure infections have suddenly emerged in humans and other animals, the WHO is leaving a slot on its list for a germ we don’t yet know. Research here may include looking for agents that might explode.
Definitely worse than Zika, this disease is not receiving much attention, because in the USA it is mostly immigrants that have it, and there are no visible signs that you are infected.
Chagas kills 10,000 people evert year, and 100,00 Americans are infected. Yep, and you haven’t heard of it?
Clearly this disease needs to be better known, and cures sought. But as long as the suffers are poor immigrants, there’s little chance of that happening…
Source: HuffPost
A picture tells a thousand words. This picture, of words, shows where we are headed if we keep abusing antibiotics and they lose their magic:
