Posted: 3/11/2013 8:37:57 AM EDT
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/10/antibiotic-resistance-catastrophic-threat_n_2850651.html
Untreatable infections coming to a hospital near you |
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Quoted:
Just spray everything with isopropyl alcohol for cleaning all the time. What could possibly go wrong? Work in a primary school for a while. Some kids could spend all day playing with hand sanitizer. "Antimicrobial resistance poses a catastrophic threat. If we don't act now, any one of us could go into hospital in 20 years for minor surgery and die because of an ordinary infection that can't be treated by antibiotics," Davies told reporters as she published a report on infectious disease.
"And routine operations like hip replacements or organ transplants could be deadly because of the risk of infection." One of the best known superbugs, MRSA, is alone estimated to kill around 19,000 people every year in the United States - far more than HIV and AIDS - and a similar number in Europe. Perfectly believable - my dad was nearly killed by an MSRA infection after arthroscopic shoulder surgery about 5 years ago. 
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Antibiotic resistance is nothing new, it is important to understand that it only becomes resistant to one form of antibiotic. penicillin, ampicillin, usually things with weird names that end with 'in', not alcohol. Antibiotics are proteins that inhibit growth, isopropyl alcohol kills them outright.
Antibiotic resistance is not always a bad thing, for example when engineering bacteria you include an resistance in the new gene. This is because only a small amount of the bacteria will take up the new gene, so you grow them on a plate with an antibiotic in it and only the modified ones will grow. |