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from the Superfungi-is-the-name-of-my-grunge-rock-band dept.
[...] In 2013, researchers at Michigan State University carried out a thankless, if mildly creepy, study. They observed how more than 3,500 residents of their college town used the sink at various restrooms after they carried out their business.
Some 10 percent of people observed chose not to wash their hands at all, which is simply not an acceptable way to end a trip to the bathroom. But even the vast majority of people who tried to wash their hands managed to totally flub the proper routine. Almost a quarter of people washed their hands without soap, for instance. And only 5 percent washed their hands for at least 15 seconds or longer, which is actually lower than the 20-second minimum of handwashing recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
https://gizmodo.com/in-a-world-of-mrsa-and-superfungi-you-need-to-start-wa-1833889953
(Score: 3, Touché) by ikanreed on Thursday April 11 2019, @03:42PM (7 children)
Yes, why would deadly hard-to-treat diseases end up in a hospital?
There must be a reason. It's not like people from all over would just... bring it there with them. That'd be crazy. Gotta be the employees.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 11 2019, @03:48PM (6 children)
Because in hospitals there's a lot of exposure to antibiotics, which allows them to build up resistance against those.
(Score: 5, Informative) by ikanreed on Thursday April 11 2019, @04:15PM (4 children)
industrial sources dominate origin of antibacterial resistant strains in natural environments [sciencedirect.com]
Of course hospitals have them, and of course some strains originate in hospitals, but overwhelmingly the implication has been that antibiotic abuse, not antibiotic use, has been the primary cause of the problem [asm.org].
People with multi-resistant cases sometimes get them from medical sources. But Working on a farm that administers antibiotics to lifestock increases the risk of infection with MRSA 35 times the baseline rate [nih.gov].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 11 2019, @09:29PM (3 children)
Cuba: no "antibiotic abuse" to speak of, yet resistant microbes are there.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3024002/ [nih.gov]
(Score: 3, Informative) by ikanreed on Friday April 12 2019, @01:32AM (2 children)
Did you read your paper?
Because that's not the fucking conclusion of that paper you just linked. Their assertion is that broad pollution levels, not just antibiotic pollution levels are determinate of AR levels in natural bacteria.
I'll let their own final paragraph hammer home exactly what they think:
So... YA RLY, I guess.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday April 12 2019, @01:23PM (1 child)
Broad pollution levels != antibiotic abuse. Sounds like the paper confirms the AC's claim.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Friday April 12 2019, @02:36PM
Only if you take their claim to be a generic null hypothesis of a grossly oversimplified version of my claim.
But they're pretty clearly asserting, in the context of the conversation, that hospitals are at fault. That is not in line with the state of the literature. Even being generous that they're merely trying to refute what I said, they did intentionally ignore that I qualified what I said with phrases like "dominate sources" and "Of course hospitals have them, and of course some strains originate in hospitals".
So their refutation was a "here's an sort-of not-really exception to a thing you've said can't be overgeneralized"
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 11 2019, @04:22PM
Aye, that and plenty of BS modern cleaning solutions and practices.
Back in the good old days, hospitals only had carbolic soap [wikipedia.org] in the toilets, used to wash the ward surfaces with proper strong bleaches and pine disinfectants, and the public areas washed with Jeyes Fluid [wikipedia.org].
Hospitals used to smell 'clean', people who visited someone in hospital came back smelling of the various bleaches, disinfectants etc they'd encountered there, now (well, at least two years ago when I had a brief stay¹ in the local one²) it's the fucking hospital that stinks of the visitors after visiting hours...go figure.
--
¹ For the record, I did pick up a wound infection at the hospital after minor(ish) surgery, as the hospital apparently wasn't bothered, I fucking killed it myself with fire (well, Betadine, 99.9% Isopropanol, a mild bleach solution and a strict wound management regime..)
² A 'modern' 1970's monstrosity which replaced a rather nice airy, clean Victorian one which I had the (mis)fortune to have spent a week in back in the early 70's for some major surgery, and had to visit on multiple other occasions back then with broken limbs (skateboards...fun times...)