Wash your hands with soap to kill both bacteria and viruses

Toilet paper seems to have returned to Marc's, and now chicken is disappearing. Bleach seems to be in short supply. Still don't see a lot of antiseptic hand cleaner. I wonder how many people who buy that know that soap and water is still the best for both viruses and bacteria.  Maybe some of those Happy Talk commercials on what fun it is to stay locked down could be replaced by videos of proper hand washing?

https://www.fda.gov/consumers/consumer-updates/antibacterial-soap-you-can-skip-it-use-plain-soap-and-water

http://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2017/say-goodbye-antibacterial-soaps-fda-banning-household-item/

Our dependence on China for prescription drugs

https://sharylattkisson.com/2020/02/china-syndrome-our-surprising-dependence-on-china-for-our-prescription-drugs/

This was from 2018 by Sharyl Attkisson—but even more alarming today with the coronavirus.

Sharyl Attkisson: In the 1990’s, the US, Europe, and Japan manufactured 90 percent of the key ingredients from medicine and vitamins. But now China is the largest global supplier. Why the change?

Rosemary Gibson: The change is because when we started buying generic drugs, which are terrific because they can be a lot less costly than brand name drugs, we had to find a cheaper way to make them. And China was more than willing with its lower labor costs to be a place where companies could buy those key ingredients.

Sharyl Attkisson: We’re talking about antibiotics, chemotherapies antidepressants. What other kinds of things?

Rosemary Gibson: Well, now, the generic drugs that we’re buying from China and Chinese companies in China include blood pressure medicines, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, epilepsy, antidepressants the whole range of generic drugs now that we are importing from China.

And more. . .

What are malacidins? Drugs from dirt

"Recently, NIH-funded researchers discovered a new class of antibiotics, called malacidins, by analyzing the DNA of the bacteria living in more than 2,000 soil samples, including many sent by citizen scientists living all across the United States [1]. While more work is needed before malacidins can be tried in humans, the compounds successfully killed several types of multidrug-resistant bacteria in laboratory tests. Most impressive was the ability of malacidins to wipe out methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) skin infections in rats. Often referred to as a “super bug,” MRSA threatens the lives of tens of thousands of Americans each year [2]."

https://directorsblog.nih.gov/2018/02/20/powerful-antibiotics-found-in-dirt/

http://www.drugsfromdirt.org/DrugsFromDirt/news/

Get Smart Week, November 14-20

 

Get Smart About Antibiotics Week is an annual one-week observance by the CDC to raise awareness of the threat of antibiotic resistance and the importance of appropriate antibiotic prescribing and use based on a September 2015 Executive Order. https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/09/18/executive-order-combating-antibiotic-resistant-bacteria

Not all Executive Orders are bad or life changing. The numbers of them mean little.  FDR is the all time winner, and Bill Clinton issued more than either Bush or Obama.  It will take some research to find out if all the committees and boards on the antibiotics week (Executive Order 12353 of March 23, 1982 revised) have reported to the President. To check others, and to see if you think Congress should have been involved: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/executive-orders

 I read through the change order for revising the wording of collecting funds and volunteer time from federal employees for distribution to voluntary organizations, and not sure I could understand the legalize. In central Ohio we get "Bucks for Charity" which is October 3-November 30 (I just received mine yesterday) listing 300 local charitable organizations to support.  I always read this carefully--many are organizations that I would never donate to. I think it's better to know the organizations personally and donate with discrimination.

I wrote about this in 2006 and found an acronym COSMO, Community Share of Mid Ohio, which appeared to get 10% of the total, and then it's organizations received percentages of that.  Here were some groups I would never donate to individually.

•  ACLU mid-Ohio chapter, 18.8%;
  
  BRAVO, which works to eliminate violence perpetrated on the basis of sexual orientation and gender, 31%;
  
  Kaleidoscope for gay, lesbian, bixexual, transgendered and questioning youth, 14.8%;
  
  NARAL Pro-Choice (formerly known as National Abortion Rights Action League, then the National Abortion & Reproductive Rights Action League, but it still kills babies);
  
  Coalition on sexual assault;
  
  domestic violence network, 5.7%;
  
  NOW education and Legal Fund, 12% (recently changed its name to Legal Momentum apparently to hide its connection to NOW);
  
  Open Hand for AIDS, 15%;
  
  Stonewall (gay rights), 19.1%;
  
  a variety of environmental, disability, animal rights, and arts groups;
  
  Camp Fire, 28%; Cat Welfare 1%; and Habitat for Humanity, 4.9%. 

Cat Welfare is still on the list, which I think is not right (even though our sweet kitty lived there in her youth) as is NARAL.  What is Stonewall using its money for now?  Hormones for sexually confused children?

Teixobactin—this is good news

I love this stuff. God doesn't make junk. "Many of the most widely used antibiotics have come out of the dirt. Penicillin came from Penicillium, a fungus found in soil, and vancomycin came from a bacterium found in dirt. Now, researchers from Northeastern University and NovoBiotic Pharmaceuticals and their colleagues have identified a new Gram-positive bacteria-targeting antibiotic from a soil sample collected in Maine that can kill species including methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Moreover, the researchers have not yet found any bacteria that are resistant to the antibiotic, called teixobactin. Their results are published today (January 7) in Nature." The Scientist, Jan. 7, 2015.

Rise of the superbug

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikZQPB45Zbw

University of Texas at San Antonio microbiologist Karl Klose discusses the problem of antibiotic resistance in a 2013 TEDx talk.(There’s a gap in the middle—a technical talk with no tech back-up.)

Humans have more bacterial cells than human cells.  Yuk.

Rectal herpes

I write a lot of medical stuff, although not as much as I used to as I get further and further away from my former job (veterinary medicine library). Today someone visited my site looking for “rectal herpes,” so I checked to see what I’d written, and found a 2006 article about what must be one of the dumbest characters in the anals annals of medicine. Not only did he smoke a pack of cigarettes a day, but was also a user of marijuana and meth AND he was a promiscuous 31 year old gay man.

“He has AIDS, rectal discharge, pain when defecating and blood in his stool, pelvic pain, nausea, and weakness. It's the pain, not the AIDS that has sent him to the doctor this time. He has regular anal intercourse without condoms with his "usual partner" who also is HIV positive, and he has other partners.” NEJM, Jan. 19, 2006 .

He was diagnosed with AIDS as a teen-ager (12 years before) and over the course of his disease has received at various times zidovudine, lamivudine, nelfinavir, ritonavir-lopinavir, cephalexin, clarithromycin ethambutol, didanosine, stavudine, and efavirenz. In addition to AIDS he developed Kaposi's sarcoma, oral thrush, rectal herpes simplex and anal condylomas because even with all this medical treatment (or because of it) he never gave up his promiscuity. Then he was treated with acyclovir, fluconazole, and dapsone; for the current problem, he got ceftriaxone and azithromycin. Now he had lymphogranuloma venereum proctitis. A series of lab tests showed he didn’t have gonorrhea, herpes simplex, chlamydia and syphilis--all common among gay men--maybe those bacteria couldn‘t survive the chemical soup floating through his body.

I’m sure that under Obamacare, these careless, do-nothings (except for bath houses, male prostitutes and voting) will have full access to the government run pharmacies, and the elderly and poor will have fully managed and minimum care of aspirin and 7-Up.

3611

I shouldn't be surprised, but I was

Medical staff need special training to learn to use alcohol hand disinfectants properly. Who knew?

There was an alarming story in the WSJ this morning about antibiotic resistant super bugs (Henry Masur, President of Infectious Diseases Society of America). He said that annually nearly 2 million U.S. patients acquire infections in the hospital and nearly 1 in 10 die, and more than 70% of those infections are resistant to at least one of the drugs used to treat them. We have so over regulated big pharm and the market is so limited, that research on new antibiotics is stalled. In the past 15 years FDA has approved approximately the same number of new antiviral medications that target HIV as it has antibiotics to treat all bacterial infections combined. Yet, thousands and thousands die of resistant strains of bacteria. It's market forces and length of time to get approved. Many, many people with HIV, but limited number in the groups affected by all the different bacteria. Also, there is no political lobby or Hollywood movie stars putting on benefits for the rest of us who develop a raging infection in the hospital.

We're losing more people to this than to HIV. What good will it do the gay guy if you save him from his past only to have him die of a bug that's resistant to antibiotics?

Anyway, back to the hand rubs. I searched Medline for "antibiotics AND resistance" and got something like 35,000 hits, so I reentered the search adding hospitals, and eventually I found this little gem: "Introducing alcohol-based hand rub for hand hygiene: the critical need for training." Infect Control Hosp Epidemiol. 2007; 28(1):50-4.

RESULTS: At baseline, only 31% of Health Care Workers (HCW) used proper technique, yielding a low reducation factor (RF) of 1.4 log(10) colony-forming units (cfu) bacterial count. Training improved HCW compliance to 74% and increased the RF to 2.2 log(10) cfu bacterial count, an increase of almost 50% (P<.001). Several factors, such as applying the proper amount of hand rub, were significantly associated with the increased RF. CONCLUSION: These results demonstrate that education on the proper technique for using hand rub, as outlined in European Norm 1500 (EN 1500), can significantly increase the degree of bacterial killing.

Well, what do you know! Makes me think of kindergarten when we were taught how to wash our hands. Is that still taught in public schools?

Bad bugs need drugs campaign