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As a recently-retired physician who is married to a nurse-midwife, my preparedness group looks to us as the post-TEOTWAWKI hospital and medical staff. Medical progress has been exponential and even just the last decade of scientific breakthroughs can equal a century of improvement in medical treatments, surgical techniques and pharmaceuticals. However, in the years (months?) ahead, the crumbling of the infrastructure and devolution of society in general will very likely throw us back to a medical system that existed in the 19th Century. Let’s take an example: When the U.S. was a young nation, the average woman could expect to...

A company in Shanghai which collects "gutter" oil. (Photo/Xinhua) Joincare Pharmaceutical Group, which is listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange, has been accused of using recycled waste cooking oil as an ingredient in antibiotics, reports the Shanghai Securities News. Citing the indictment filed by prosecutors with the Ningbo Intermediate People's Court in Zhejiang province, the newspaper said Joincare was the largest user of the "gutter" oil produced by Gelin Biology Company in Jinan, Shandong province. Gutter oil refers to waste oil collected from restaurants and illegally reused. The prosecutors said Gelin sold its gutter oil to a company called...

As doctors battled a deadly, drug-resistant superbug at the National Institutes of Health’s Clinical Center last year, they turned to an antibiotic of last resort. But colistin, is not a fancy new creation of modern biotechnology. It was discovered in a beaker of fermenting bacteria in Japan — in 1949. That doctors have resorted to such an old, dangerous drug — colistin causes kidney damage — highlights the lack of new antibiotics coming out of the pharmaceutical pipeline ... Experts point to three reasons pharmaceutical companies have pulled back from antibiotics ... There is not much money in it; inventing...

Pictures, If You Can Stand It. Health officials say they're worried that one day there will be no more antibiotics left to treat gonorrhea. There's some disturbing news out today about a disease we don't hear about much these days: gonorrhea. Federal health officials announced that the sexually transmitted infection is getting dangerously close to being untreatable. As a result, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued new guidelines for how doctors should treat gonorrhea. The guidelines are designed to keep one of the remaining effective antibiotics useful for as long as possible by restricting the use of...

A sexually transmitted disease that infects millions of people each year is growing resistant to drugs and could soon become untreatable, the World Health Organization said Wednesday. The U.N. health agency is urging governments and doctors to step up surveillance of antibiotic-resistant gonorrhea, a bacterial infection that can cause inflammation, infertility, pregnancy complications and, in extreme cases, lead to maternal death. Babies born to mothers with gonorrhea have a 50 percent chance of developing eye infections that can result in blindness.

Garlic may be the best weapon against a type of bacteria responsible for millions of cases of food poisoning in the United States every year, according to a new study. Researchers from Washington State University discovered that a compound found in garlic was 100 times more effective than antibiotics at killing Campylobacter, most common cause of food-borne bacterial illness in the United States. The compound, diallyl sulphide, which is responsible for the garlic smell that sticks to your hands when you cook, worked better and faster than the common antibiotic treatments for Campylobacter, erythromycin and ciprofloxacin. Eating massive quantities of...

How does the livestock industry talk about antibiotics? Well, it depends on who’s doing the talking, but they all say some version of the same thing. Take the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association; they say there is “no conclusive scientific evidence indicating the judicious use of antibiotics in cattle herds leads to antimicrobial resistance in humans [MRSA].” Or Ron Phillips of the Animal Health Institute (a drug-industry front group). In an interview on Grist last year, he said that before you can draw any conclusions: … You have to look at specific bug/drug combinations and figure out what are the potential...

Antibiotics don't help fight most sinus infections, although doctors routinely prescribe them for that purpose, according to a U.S. study. Researchers whose work was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that antibiotics didn't ease patients' symptoms or get them back to work any sooner than an inactive placebo pill. Antibiotics are known to fuel the evolution of drug-resistant bacteria and experts have grown increasingly worried about overuse. This is a particular concern with sinus infections, because doctors can't tell if the disease is caused by bacteria or by a virus, in which case antibiotics are useless....

One of the most common questions that I am asked from prospective survival medics is “What antibiotics should I stockpile and how do I use them?” There isn’t a 60 second answer to this. Actually, there isn’t a 60 MINUTE answer to this, but anyone that is interested in preserving the health of their loved ones in a collapse will have to learn what antibiotics will work in a particular situation. It’s important to start off by saying that you will not want to indiscriminately use antibiotics for every minor ailment that comes along. In a collapse, the medic is...

Hamilton, ON (Dec. 22, 2011) - Drugs used to overcome cancer may also combat antibiotic resistance, finds a new study led by Gerry Wright, scientific director of the Michael G. DeGroote Institute for Infectious Disease Research at McMaster University. "Our study found that certain proteins, called kinases, that confer antibiotic resistance are structurally related to proteins important in cancer," says Wright about the study published in Chemistry & Biology. "The pharmaceutical sector has made a big investment in targeting these proteins, so there are a lot of compounds and drugs out there that, although they were designed to overcome cancer,...

Too many people in Tennessee are asking for antibiotics and too many doctors are prescribing them — a practice that renders once-powerful drugs ineffective against infections, according to a recently released study......“Unless we do something really radical and different, we’re going to lose these drugs,” said Dr. Ramanan Laxminarayan, an epidemiologist and economist in Washington, D.C., who was a co-author of the study. “It’s not like we’re going to. We already have in many instances and things are just getting worse...” (Excerpted) http://www.tennessean.com/article/20111118/NEWS07/311180046/Tenn-ranks-3rd-antibiotic-use

> Although the early symptoms of the illness are quite mild, if left untreated, it can result in serious damage to the skin, the joints, the heart and the nervous system, and effective therapy becomes very difficult. A team of researchers led by the veterinary bacteriologist Professor Reinhard Straubinger at Ludwig-Maximilians Universität (LMU) München has now shown, in an animal model, that application of a gel containing the antibiotic azithromycin to the site of the bite rapidly terminates the infection. The efficacy of this local antibiotic therapy for the treatment of borreliosis in humans is now being tested in a...

A new strain of the sexually transmitted disease gonorrhoea has become resistant to antibiotics, international research shows. Analysis of the bacterium that causes gonorrhoea found a new variant which is very effective at mutating. Scientists from the Swedish Reference Laboratory warn that the infection could now become a global threat to public health. New drugs to delay the spread of the infection are needed, experts say. The first case of antibiotic-resistant gonorrhoea was found in Japan. By analysing this new strain of neisseria gonorrhoea, called H041, researchers identified the genetic mutations responsible for the new strain's extreme resistance to all...

Guess that it was bound to happen. Was just a matter of time. But now I’ve come to my decision, And it’s one of the painful kind. ‘Cause now it seems that you wanted a martyr. Just a regular guy wouldn’t do. But baby I can’t hang upon no lover’s cross for you. ~ Jim CroceThis sweet, sad lyric by Jim Croce may well be the new anthem in the sexual revolution, as word comes recently from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that strains of Gonorhhea that are resistant to all antibiotics have now emerged. Get all of...

Doctors have discovered that adding sugar to antibiotics increases their ability to knock out persistent staph infections (abstract). Certain types of bacteria called persisters shut down their metabolic processes when exposed to antibiotics. Adding sugar keeps the bacteria feeding, making them more susceptible to drugs. From the article: "Adding such a simple and widely available compound to existing antibiotics enhances their effectiveness against persisters, and fast. One test showed that a sugared up antibiotic could eliminate 99.9 percent of persisters in two hours, while a regular antibiotic did nothing. Doctors believe that this discovery will help treat urinary tract infections,...

A new breed of biodegradable nanoparticles can glom on to drug-resistant bacteria, breaching their cell walls and leaking out their contents, selectively killing them. The polymer particles could someday be used in anything from injectable treatments for drug-resistant bacteria, to new antibacterial soaps and deodorants, according to inventors at IBM. After their work is done, the particles break apart, flushing away with the invaders they destroyed. The nanoparticles, which IBM says are relatively inexpensive, were effective against bugs that have been evolving to resist antibiotics, including methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). Preliminary results suggest the particles could also be effective against...

ON DECEMBER 11th 1945, at the end of his Nobel lecture, Alexander Fleming sounded a warning. Fleming’s chance observation of the antibiotic effects of a mould called Penicillium on one of his bacterial cultures had inspired his co-laureates, Howard Florey and Ernst Chain, two researchers based in Oxford, to extract the mould’s active principal and turn it into the miracle cure now known as penicillin. But Fleming could already see the future of antibiotic misuse. “There is the danger”, he said, “that the ignorant man may easily underdose himself and by exposing his microbes to non-lethal quantities of the drug...

Dr. Brad Spellberg, an infectious disease expert at Harbor UCLA Medical Center says there is no current teatment for CRKP bacteria — and there might not be any in the future either. County health officials warn the elderly are especially at risk of CRKP infections. (Getty Images) “There’s been a complete collapse in the development of new antibiotics over the last decade…and in the next decade there isn’t going to be anything that becomes available that’s going to be able to treat these bacteria,” said Spellberg. Medical expert Dr. David Baron of Primary Caring in Malibu cautions hospital visitors that...

Prescribing antibiotics for patients with discoloured phlegm caused by acute cough has little or no effect on alleviating symptoms and recovery, a Cardiff University study has found. Acute cough is one of the common reasons why people visit their GP and accounts for a large proportion of antibiotics prescribed in the community. One of the most common questions asked by GPs to their patients is about their phlegm: "Are you coughing anything up?" or "What colour is your phlegm?" Clinicians and patients commonly believe that yellow and green phlegm production is associated with a bacterial infection, which is more likely...

New Antibiotics, Stat!The drug makers are in a bind — and public health is in danger. The development of new antibiotics has slowed to a trickle, just when we need them most. As drug-resistant bacteria are on the rampage worldwide, we find ourselves in a most precarious situation — one not unlike the pre-antibiotic era, before penicillin, when staphylococcal and pneumococcal infections were the dominant pathogens. Now MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) kills more people than AIDS every year, and various multiple-drug-resistant organisms have appeared, leaving doctors with few therapeutic weapons for treating a number of prevalent infections. How did this...