Words about science and hiking
It seems like a good idea. After all, combination therapy of antivirals for HIV treatment transformed AIDS from a death sentence into a manageable chronic condition. But bacteria are not viruses. The scenario in which combining antibiotics makes most sense is when long-term therapy is anticipated—such as for TB treatment. Development of resistance to single Read More …
Jon Otter tweeted out this graph today, and it just blows me away: “Trust apportioned” is apparently the term in UK English for what we in the US call hospitals. So the dotted lines are hospitals and the solid lines include community cases. Huge drops in C diff diarrhea and MRSA BSIs. This is the English Read More …
Our healthcare system is oriented toward cures, not prevention. Outlays for public health measures have never been more than 2-3% of total healthcare spending, and this small amount is falling – even though we know that every dollar spent returns several dollars in benefits. We could blame greedy doctors or pharmas or hospitals, or more Read More …
The FDA today cleared a new drug for treating influenza, the first in 20 years. Xofluza (baloxovir) appears to have about the same efficacy as oseltamivir in reducing symptoms of patients with uncomplicated influenza infections. Maybe a little better: From Baloxavir Marboxil for Uncomplicated Influenza in Adults and Adolescents Baloxavir attacks a different target (RNA replication) Read More …
I tend to be pretty dismissive of predictions of the superbug apocalypse. Yes, antibiotic resistance is a real problem and causes real deaths now and will cause even more later. But it is a pretty slow-moving sort of apocalypse and there are lots of changes and adaptations that we can make to slow it down. Read More …
Another paper about another phage protein isn’t usually cause for notice. There are lots of phage, and they have lots of proteins, and figuring out what they all do could occupy the efforts of scientists for several millennia. Which is precisely my point. What’s sometimes lost in all the excitement about genomics is that it Read More …
Staph aureus excels at evading the human immune system, and its innocuous-seeming color is just one more of its tricks. The characteristic golden color was noted when it was first isolated from infected surgical wounds in 1881[1] From Microbiology in Pictures The pigment is a carotenoid, a cousin to the anti-oxidant vitamin A found in carrots Read More …
The good news is that your risk of getting a MRSA infection due to living with a MRSA carrier is not high. It’s not zero, either, but it’s not high. The bad news is that we really don’t know how MRSA is transmitted within households, and thus we don’t know how to prevent it. The Read More …
Of all the bad bugs, S. aureus – Staph – is accounted among the worst. Several hundred thousand Americans suffer severe Staph infections every year and 30,000 die. If any bacterium deserves to be classified as a pest and a killer, a microbial reprobate beyond redemption, it is surely the grape-clustered golden spheres of Staphylococcus aureus. But few bugs Read More …
If only. Not only can resistant S. aureus (MRSA) not be distinguished from susceptible (MSSA) strains under the microscope, they can’t even be distinguished from other, far less pathogenic species of Staphylococcus, such as S. epidermidis or S. hemolyticus. S. epidermidis Gram stain S. aureus Gram stain Both would be reported by a clinical lab Read More …