Yes, McCain as President. Yes, 100 more years of war in the Middle East. Yes, the decline in the dollar and home forclosures. Yes, to more natural disasters and global warming. And yes to 6 more months of election year bs. Following the fold some real scary stuff.....
This has been out there for a long time but seems to be below the radar screen with respect to other things that could really impact the lives of people around the world.
I'm talking about the growing ineffectiveness of antibiotics due to nasty bacteria that seem to understand Darwin's Theory of Evolution better than some of the so called educators and politicans in this country.
I read the following McClatchy article during the craziness surrounding the IN/NC primary last Monday.
McClatchy - Killer Bugs
The article states the following:
Infectious microbes that used to be able to resist only one drug, such as penicillin or methicillin, now resist multiple drugs. Some can survive virtually every weapon in doctors' medicine cabinets.
``This is very worrisome,'' said Stuart Levy, a microbiologist at Tufts University in Boston. ``In many cases, there might be only one or no drugs to treat (an infection). We are not keeping up with the bacteria.''
Two troubling recent developments:
Some bacteria have acquired the ability to ``eat'' the very antibiotic medicines that are supposed to eat them.
``Almost all the drugs that we consider as our mainline defense against bacterial infections are at risk from bacteria that not only resist the drugs but eat them for breakfast,'' George Church, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, wrote in the April 4 issue of the journal Science.
A lethal new form of tuberculosis, known as XDR-TB, that's virtually impossible to cure has exploded in Africa, Asia and Russia. There are also a small number of cases in the United States.
These XDR-TB bacteria possess ``such extensive drug resistance as to be nearly untreatable with currently available drugs,'' Sarita Shah, a epidemiologist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City, reported in the Emerging Infectious Diseases journal.
Regarding a recent strain of TB.....
``If we don't act now, we are going really to risk a disaster of an enormous proportions,'' said Mario Raviglione, the director of WHO's Stop TB Department.
``This is not a joke,'' Raviglione added in a telephone news conference arranged by WHO. ``TB itself is a very serious disease. It implies suffering. It implies six months of treatment, a chance of dying. When you deal with MDR-TB, the chance of dying goes to 30 percent. When you are dealing with XDR-TB, the chance of dying is more than 50 percent.''
Some years ago I read or watched heard about two items that have stuck with me - 2 snippets that gave some insight into what life was like before antibiotics.
Calvin Coolidge dies after playing tennis.....
No, not the President, but his son, Calvin Jr. If anyone could have received treatment that would have cured an injury you would think it would be the child of a sitting president. But it was not to be:
Blood Poising from a Blister
There are reports that President Coolidge was never the same after losing his son. It may well have effected his ability to govern. Imagine how you would feel if you watched helplessly as a son or daughter or other loved one died in front of you due to a minor infection....
Coolidge and Depression
Coolidge himself explained the change in his presidency best of all when he wrote in his autobiography that when Calvin Jr. went, "the power and glory of the presidency went with him." In a very real sense, then, when Calvin Coolidge lost his son, the nation lost its president.
The second story was about a person much like you or I.
Anne Sheafe Miller, who made medical history as the first patient ever saved by penicillin, died on May 27 in Salisbury, Conn. She was 90.
In March 1942, Mrs. Miller was near death at New Haven Hospital suffering from a streptococcal infection, a common cause of death then. She had been hospitalized for a month, often delirious with her temperature spiking to nearly 107, while doctors tried everything available, including sulfa drugs, blood transfusions and surgery. All failed.
As she slipped in and out of consciousness, her desperate doctors obtained a tiny amount of what was still an obscure, experimental drug and injected her with it. Her hospital chart, now at the Smithsonian Institution, registered a sharp overnight drop in temperature, and by the next day she was no longer delirious and soon was eating full meals, one of her doctors reported.
Mrs. Miller's life was saved, and so eventually were the lives of all those previously felled by infections of bacteria like streptococci, staphylococci and pneumococci. Penicillin also saved the lives of an untold number of servicemen and civilians wounded in World War II; in earlier wars, people died by the thousands from bacterial infections resulting from their injuries.
Ann Shaefe Miller
I was struck by this story when I first read about this women. She was going to die. But because of work done by scientists at Oxford and Columbia she didn't. It was a "miracle". A miracle that was the result of hard work and research.
Penicillin
The line from Mrs. Miller's obituary in the NYT is key:
An untold number of servicemen and civilians wounded in WWII were saved due to penicillin. In earlier wars and in earlier times those who suffered injuries that became infected often died, by the thousands.
One only has to look at the amazing pictures of a young girl with blood poisining before treatment and a few days later....
Howard Florey
As this article states:
How many times have you accidentally pricked your finger on a rose thorn, or perhaps a sewing needle? Nowadays, if the wound became infected you'd be cured almost immediately. But before the second half of this century, you could have been in big trouble. Infections were feared then as cancer is feared today. Your glands would swell up and require lancing to release the pus. A surgeon might even have to amputate your arm in an attempt to save your life. This was the nightmare of many infectious diseases before Howard Florey developed penicillin.
Health care is a tough subject to get your head around. There are many players and high costs. Many people blame the pharmeceutical companies for their high profits vs. affordable drugs. While I wish that the high cost of advertising and marketing drugs would be spent on research and development I also understand that it takes a lot of money, time, resources, patience and luck to develop new and safe treatments for disease. Much promising work ends in a dead end. I don't know how much money Howard Florey made while working on penicillin, or how much money a researcher makes at a big Pharma company or at a research university - but I doubt they make what an entry level lawyer or investment banker makes....
As we wait for Barach Obama to become the Democratic nominee for President we may ask what our politicians can do to make sure that new antibiotics and other new treatments are developed in time, while there still is time, to prevent a potential catastrophe.
Remember what has happened during the Bush Presidency. Science has taken a back seat. We limit or halt funding for stem cell research. We have all the money we need to kill people via wars and new weapons programs while reducing funding for scientific research.
An example of this approach:
For NIH, the president's $28.6 billion proposal nominally freezes the budget at the FY06 funding level and about $63 million below the FY05 level. Taking into account that biomedical research inflation is at 4.1 percent in FY06 and is projected to be 3.8 percent in FY07, the reduction runs even deeper.
or
The federal investment in basic and applied research would fall in real terms for the fifth year in a row if the FY 2009 budget is enacted. Federal research did very well between 1998 and 2003 because of the campaign to double the budget of NIH, the largest federal supporter of research. Other agencies also increased their research investments in that time period because a string of budget surpluses freed up resources for domestic appropriations. But with the return of budget deficits in 2002 followed by restraints on domestic spending thereafter, growth in research funding for NIH and other domestic agencies slowed in 2004 and then reversed.
Advancing Science
Where will the research lead. Who knows? Could an old method work?
Phages
We won't know unless we ask the right questions and do the necessary research. Here's to those doing this research now and in the future.