Looking at Evolution through Germs part: II

Or, screwed, screwed, we are all screwed… Part II



Pretty scary, huh? A bacterial infection spread through dirty gyms that is totally resistant to antibiotic treatment. Oddly enough, most people think that this strain of Staph infection came into being at a hospital.

This is sort of counter-intuitive. Hospitals are supposed to be clean, right? The problem is that hospitals may be too clean for their own good. Anti-bacterial cleaning solutions are put down on the hospital floors, everything in use is constantly sterilized, et cetera.

Normally, this is all well and good. After all, who wants to go to a 19th century hospital? But as I stated earlier, all these sterile techniques run into the problem of rapid bacterial evolution. If one bacterium gains a mutation allowing it to survive a dose of antibiotics, in 20 minutes, there will be two of them, in 40 minutes there will be four of them, and in a day, there could be 2 to the 72nd power of them, which is more than all the people in the world, times a billion. Insert explicative of choice here.

The sad part is, there’s little middle ground on this subject. If we were to stop using antibiotics altogether, a particularly bad ear infection (which I am quite familiar with) could equal a death sentence. The best chance we have against these hospital borne “super bugs” becoming antibiotic resistant is to have doctors make educated decisions on when to administer drugs. This may be easier said than done, as many people clamor for antibiotics at the first sign of the sniffles.

Unfortunately, that’s not the only place we can find antibiotics, due to pharmaceutical companies’ large presence in American business, we can find antibacterial in our hand soaps, in the feed we give to farm animals, and even in our G&$d@*n drinking water.

What can you personally do to cut down on antibiotic use? (And perhaps stop some kind of 28 Days Later s___ from going down?)

• Buy Organic meat- being certified organic means that your chicken patty wasn’t pumped full of antibiotics at a factory farm. (plus, some say organic meat is rich in self-righteous flavors, with delicate undertones of smugness)

• Use regular hand soap, not the antibacterial kind. Bacteria will cover your hands within the next hour anyways, so you might as well skip the whole I-created-a-super bug-that-destroyed-mankind deal. If you’re a real Mysophobe, use alcohol based sanitizers instead

• When you get sick, ask the doctor if you actually need antibiotics to cure your ills. If you wind up with an antibiotic, do not stop taking them until you are done with the course.

Well, that’s all for this entry. I was only planning on doing these two, but I’m having fun with this, so I’ll do another on bacteria.

Next stop: 1347 AD- The Black Plague.