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posted by on Sunday January 15 2017, @01:53AM   Printer-friendly
from the bleach-doesn't-count dept.

If it sometimes seems like the idea of antibiotic resistance, though unsettling, is more theoretical than real, please read on.

Public health officials from Nevada are reporting on a case of a woman who died in Reno in September from an incurable infection. Testing showed the superbug that had spread throughout her system could fend off 26 different antibiotics.

"It was tested against everything that's available in the United States ... and was not effective," said Dr. Alexander Kallen, a medical officer in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's division of health care quality promotion. Although this isn't the first time someone in the US has been infected with pan-resistant bacteria, at this point, it is not common. It is, however, alarming.

[Source]: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/woman-killed-by-a-superbug-resistant-to-every-available-antibiotic/

[Journal Ref.]: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/66/wr/mm6601a7.htm


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  • (Score: 2) by sjames on Sunday January 15 2017, @06:40AM

    by sjames (2882) on Sunday January 15 2017, @06:40AM (#454027) Journal

    Clearly, they can do the extra work and still reproduce fast enough.

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  • (Score: 1, Offtopic) by VLM on Sunday January 15 2017, @01:01PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Sunday January 15 2017, @01:01PM (#454059)

    They can't, actually, unless we kill off all their competition.

    The best SN automotive analogy I can come up with is imagine varying demand for cars and varying production rates of domestic factories, if trade tariffs make it impossible to import automobiles then the performance of the domestic factory has no impact on the 100% market share which will always be 100%, although under competitive conditions the performance of the domestic plant will have quite a bit of impact on its less than 100% market share.

    • (Score: 2) by sjames on Sunday January 15 2017, @04:29PM

      by sjames (2882) on Sunday January 15 2017, @04:29PM (#454110) Journal

      They are weaker than their un-mutated cousins in the absence of antibiotics, but that doesn't mean they can't win against the immune system and kill you. You can't cure someone of a resistant strain by withholding antibiotics.

      • (Score: 2) by VLM on Sunday January 15 2017, @06:08PM

        by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Sunday January 15 2017, @06:08PM (#454125)

        Ah the gray goo scenario from nanotechnology. There's a fancy term for the same idea pre-nano technology that the bio people talk about. If I could remember the term I'd suggest you google it (sorry) but I can't find it in a casual search. I think its "something/somedude paradox" and it boils down to literally nanotech gray goo but naturally evolved. It was like turn of the last century theory, or maybe I mis-remember.

        In theory in the last billion years all life should have been wiped out and replaced by a steaming big pile of unkillable bacteria or supervirus or whatever, but in practice its never happened and it gives the bio people something to ponder about minimum viable ecological size or minimum number of viable ecosystem niches or something. Regardless of theory, in practice some sort of worldwide gray goo monoculture hasn't happened yet in a billion years.

        If you really want to piss off the SETI people you can bring this topic up that nobody talks about how there's no reason purely evolutionary gray goo hasn't wiped out the earth yet and quite possibly we're lucky (or you can get the religious people wound up). Most of the SETI people like to rag on petrochem use or nuclear war or capitalism or whatever as the killer of all the universes aliens which is why we're alone, but a gray goo, nanotechnological or old fashioned biology, is as likely.

        BTW you can't cure someone of a resistant strain by withholding antibiotics but you can prevent the infection. Roundup resistant grass can't take over my lawn because there's just too much random crap growing there because I'm a bad German with a sloppy lawn (thats an ethnic stereotype thats only true like 99% of the time) But if I took my lawn to bare dirt with repeated roundup applications, eventually I'm gonna have a lawn completely made of roundup resistant grass. Which, you are correct, can't be cured by stopping the roundup spraying. Better nuke it from orbit just to be sure.

        Anyway the relevance to your comment is the universal killer so far has never turned out to be terribly universal. The best the bio people can do so far is pretty crappy plagues affecting a species or two vs the astrophysicists have been super successful with asteroid impacts killing like 90%+ of the biosphere every couple dozen million years. At least WRT pure destructiveness, the best gray goo from the biology offices is crap compared to an asteroid every once in awhile. Something to keep in mind when bio people start talking about "super bugs" and so forth.

        • (Score: 2) by sjames on Sunday January 15 2017, @07:10PM

          by sjames (2882) on Sunday January 15 2017, @07:10PM (#454131) Journal

          The grey goo is only tangentially related. I'm talking on the scale of a single patient. If you get a bad infection with a multiply resistant bacteria, it is still more than strong enough to kill you SOMETIMES, in spite of expending energy on it's resistance.

          In the absence of antibiotics, it is a bit less deadly than the non-resistant form, but given antibiotics, it poses a much bigger threat.

          Of course, there are plenty of things that will kill even the most super of super bugs. Unfortunately, they kill us too if used internally, but they're great for sanitizing surfaces to make us less likely to get infected.

          I suspect the grey goo scenario won't happen because once a super bug got to a large enough population, some bacteriophage would come along that finds them delicious. Also, some population would likely have the right mutation to have super immunity to the super bug.

          There is some thought that the black plague went that way. It's not that the bacterium suddenly went into hiding, it's just that it killed most of the people vulnerable to it. A few people catch it every year. A lot more probably come in contact with it and nothing happens because they descended from the people who didn't get sick during the plague.