Posted on 01/24/2013 6:17:45 AM PST by cartan
Britain's most senior medical adviser has warned MPs that the rise in drug-resistant diseases could trigger a national emergency comparable to a catastrophic terrorist attack, pandemic flu or major coastal flooding.
Dame Sally Davies, the chief medical officer, said the threat from infections that are resistant to frontline antibiotics was so serious that the issue should be added to the government's national risk register of civil emergencies.
She described what she called an "apocalyptic scenario" where people going for simple operations in 20 years' time die of routine infections "because we have run out of antibiotics".
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
The supply of new antibiotics has dried up for several reasons, but a major one is that drugs companies see greater profits in medicines that treat chronic conditions, such as heart disease, which patients must take for years or even decades. "There is a broken market model for making new antibiotics," Davies told the MPs.I do not understand this. If current anti-biotics all stop working, there will be a large, very high demand for the last antibiotics that still work. Sounds like big profits to me. Isn’t that incentive enough to develop new ones?
Pandemic is certainly a concern that everyone should at least consider.
Also consider that the best way to avoid illness in a pandemic is to STAY HOME.
Do you have the ability to stay home for a month or six weeks without going out for ANYTHING?
The customer, the government, won’t pay for expensive drugs. New drugs are expensive. Thus, no R&D gets thrown into that rat hole.
Think of a drug that costs billions in r and d to get to market. Once you get it to market lawyers all over the world will start looking for reasons to sue you over it. You finally release it. Would you rather it be a drug someone takes for 7-14 days or for 40 years?
My home is my sailboat, so chances are I would go on a long fishing trip.
LOL
Think of a drug that costs billions in r and d to get to market. Once you get it to market lawyers all over the world will start looking for reasons to sue you over it. You finally release it. Would you rather it be a drug someone takes for 7-14 days or for 40 years?Yeah, fear of socialist politicians simply seizing the drug when it’s ready will certainly damp incentives to develop it. Too bad that liberals are already talking about seizing Aids drugs, for example. The talk alone may already do a lot of harm.
-——the use of catheters increases the chances of bugs entering the bloodstream-——
The use of catheters is perhaps a leading contributor to massive incurable infection. The catheter is routinely part of treatment and makes a hospital stay easier for both patient and staff. The insertion is routine and often the task of a person who mostly does only that.
A trivial distraction during the insertion process can result in very minor lapse is sterile procedure. The result is trivial infection in the urinary tract. The distraction or lack of concentration can be the result of doing the same thing over and over and over and a short cut becomes routine and fatal.
Once there, growth occurs and perhaps months later, the infection leaves the bladder and moves to other locations. The infection then becomes systemic and very very fatal. The death can be weeks or months after the hospital stay and thus not seemingly related to the hospital stay and catherization.
I would like to see mortality statistics related to infection ultimately traced back to catherization. I’m sure they are supressed.
Nurses place urinary catheters in our hospital. There is no staff that does only catheters. If one is placed we have to document the reason it is being placed and the reason to continue it on a daily basis. We have very few urinary tract infections. I don’t know of any in short term catheterizations that have gone systemic or served as a reservoir for resistant disease. Folks unlucky enough to need a catheter permanently are a different story
Catheters that are inserted by specialty teams that may be involved are iv catheters inserted into the large veins in the chest and neck. These again are only inserted when absolutely needed and watched very carefully, but can become infected, sometimes with resistant bugs. Every treatment has risk
Any catheter associated infection in a hospital whether urinary or iv are tracked very carefully by the hospital. The data is kept meticulously and any spike in infections leads to a major investigation by the infection control committee.
I’m glad you took that well. Even in the apocalypse we need to have a laugh. :)
Life poses ‘apocalyptic’ threat . . . .
Nature poses ‘apocalyptic’ threat . . . .
Mortality poses ‘apocalyptic’ threat . . . .
God’s universe poses ‘apocalyptic’ threat . . . .
I have MS, and due to the havoc it plays with the bladder, many MSers self cath. And the reason they self cath is because they have neurogenic bladders which don’t empty right that can in itself cause infection...so darned if you do, darned if you don’t.
A couple bugs have been hitting some MS patients I know, and there is no explanation because usually these are infections that are found in hospitals...but they are hitting people that don’t even self cath and have not been hospitalized (that’s what’s hard for me to figure out how it’s happening.) Pseudomonas and Proteus mirabellis seem to be the major offenders. Pseudomonas is a tough one, almost no drugs to combat it but IV antibiotics.
Tracey Ullman doing Campbell Brown is a riot!
“When will the nightmare begin and when will it end? And if it ends when will it begin again? Then when will it end again?”
Yes, she is and it's so true...how they stir the public up with something to be panicked about.
I heard one of them is gonorreah. I guess that might have an effect on the promiscuous I-sleep-with-everyone-I-meet crowd.
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