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 grandfather’s 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 cousin’s 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 ...
ping.
Anybody ever heard of this?
In 1941, I had a great Uncle die of a ruptured appendix, or so his death certificate states. My Great Aunt told me that a week after his appendix was removed, he was in the hospital doing fine. She went back to visit him the next day and he was talking about things like “you’re young, I want you to remarry”, “make sure the kids know I love them”. My Great Aunt said “You’ll be fine.” They had a 3 and 5 year old at the time, my Aunt being the 3 year old. He died the next day.
Fast forward to 1953, and my Aunt was 16. She went to the hospital and the doctor saw her name and asked her if my Great Uncle was her father. She said yes. He almost started crying and said they had given my Great Uncle a drug recommended for a ruptured appendix and he thinks they killed him, because when the hospital finally went through their mail in 1941, there was a Government advisory not to use this drug as it could
cause death. This was a small rural hospital. My Aunt was shocked and told her mother, but they did nothing. “Nothing can bring your father back”, my Great Aunt had said.
Does anyone know what this drug could have been?
It certainly stopped the ones that died.
Thanks. Now I even kno how to spel it. (smile)
Everything is a double edged sword.
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She is a sort of an embarrassing communicable infection, isn't she.
If the act was repealed in 1997, my question: Why isn't the pharmaceutical industry reinvested in developing antibiotics?
Gee...I wonder.../s
I had a great-uncle who died in his 30s, on the day after President Harding died. His widow died in 1990, aged 101 (she had married again and been widowed a second time). I don't know what my great-uncle died of. One of his brothers lived to 94.
I believe the death rate for either group, ultimately, is approximately 100%.
Does the study cite a specific age group in order to arrive at this conclusion?
I have to ask, because statements like "reduce your chances of dying!" irritate the crap out of me. Your chances are still 100%. The only question is when.
—Does the study cite a specific age group in order to arrive at this conclusion?
The average age of death of the prostitutes in the study was 34.
Good read about the first antibiotic.
So, excuse me for being difficult, but if the prostitutes died at 34, and the rest of the study group died, at say 75, how did fewer of anyone die? The risk of dying remains at 100%. Only the timing changes.
No, she never remarried and died at 92! Was buried next to her husband 64 years later! She always said she had to much to do, working hard and raising her children.
I noticed I probably confused everybody by saying my Great Aunt’s daughter was my Aunt. It’s just that there was such an age difference we called her Aunt. (we were born 40 years apart!) My family has an interesting dynamic and age range!
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