Posted on 12/01/2013 8:22:41 PM PST by JerseyanExile
After 85 years, antibiotics are growing impotent. So what will medicine, agriculture and everyday life look like if we lose these drugs entirely?
A few years ago, I started looking online to fill in chapters of my family history that no one had ever spoken of. I registered on Ancestry.com, plugged in the little I knew, and soon was found by a cousin whom I had not known existed, the granddaughter of my grandfathers older sister. We started exchanging documents. After a few months, she sent me something disturbing.
It was a black-and-white scan of an article clipped from the long-gone Argus of Rockaway Beach, New York.The article was about my great-uncle Joe, the youngest brother of my cousins grandmother and my grandfather. In a family that never talked much about the past, he had been discussed even less than the rest. I knew he had been a fireman in New York City and died young, and that his death scarred his family with a grief they never recovered from.
I had always heard Joe had been injured at work: not burned, but bruised and cut when a heavy brass hose nozzle fell on him. The article revealed what happened next. Through one of the scrapes, an infection set in. After a few days, he developed an ache in one shoulder; two days later, a fever. His wife and the neighborhood doctor struggled for two weeks to take care of him, then flagged down a taxi and drove him fifteen miles to the hospital in my grandparents town. He was there one more week, shaking with chills and muttering through hallucinations, and then sinking into a coma as his organs failed. Nothing worked. He was thirty when he died, in March 1938.
(Excerpt) Read more at thefern.org ...
It could be scary. In the years before antibiotics, 90% if deaths were caused by infectious diseases. After antibiotics became widespread, that figure changed to 10%. Now heart disease and Cancer are the big killers.
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And GC and Syphilis were present in the population. There were catheters that men carried under their hatband ribbons to stick up their urethra's in order to void because of the damage from gonorrhea.
And the syphilitic babies who were born blind and with IQs of less than 10 that peopled the centers for the feeble-minded. I cared for one who was grown in a nursing home when I was young.
Back then one had to at least have a negative Wassermann, which was a test for syphilis in order to get a marriage license. Part of public health prevention.
Bingo!
That and Hillary got Slick to pass a law for her idiotic Hillary care that took all of the monetary incentives out of creating antibiotics and vaccine.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/13/opinion/13kristof.html?_r=0
...The mortality data for prostitutes is staggering. The American Journal of Epidemiology published a meticulous study finding that the workplace homicide rate for prostitutes is 51 times that of the next most dangerous occupation for women, working in a liquor store. The average age of death of the prostitutes in the study was 34.
** Chris Grussendorf, “No Humans Involved, Part One”, http://www.catwinternational.org/factbook/usa2_prost.php
...Women in prostitution have a death rate that is 40 times higher than women who are not involved in prostitution.**
But you did you know that Old McDonald is a really bad speller?
Researching my family tree, every family had 8, 9 or 10+ kids. One or two children would die and the survivors would live well into their 80s or 90s. From 1700 on, every generation was like this.
How are plastic polymers even remotely similar to human cells?
Nano’s are the next unknown nightmare.
Sulfanilomide
My daddy was born in May 1920.
His daddy died in June 1920 from an infection in a cut on his finger.
Beginning in the 1490s the Great Pox (syphilis)
ravaged Europe for nearly a century.
It could happen again...
Personally, I think bacteriophages show great promise. Especially once genetic engineering reaches a level where they can tailor the bacteriophage right there in the hospital and tell it to go after a particular breed of bacteria.
Watch this PBS Frontline video - it’ll scare the crap outta you ...
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/hunting-the-nightmare-bacteria/
Its the full video - about 53 minutes.
It follows 3 cases of different varieties of “super bugs”. One in the American Southwest, one from a vacation in India, and a breakout at NIH.
Excellent commercial.
>> a test for syphilis in order to get a marriage license
Now the state is promoting anal sex. Go figure.
No worries. Probiotics attack overgrowths in billion man armies. Not sure Americans will ever get past the idea that bacteria are bad, almost all bacteria serve some useful purpose.
As long as the government stays out of it we will be fine. Humans have a limitless capacity to invent and innovate.
Of course if government is involved I can see a time when we will live in a world made by hand and die young because they tried to "conserve" instead of advance.
Seems I read recently that nano tech may the answer. The rough surface they create totally destroys all micro organisms, The “germs” that cause infections may be defeted before entry.
At the top it gives you a “read time”. I’ve never seen that before.
Setting timer...
One of my pet peeves too. People acting like people in modern times are more immoral than they were 100 years ago. Ridiculous.
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