I’ve heard rumors like this for decades
This one may even be true:
Two completely drug-resistant versions of the venereal disease [gonorrhoea] have been found and identified – with fears rampant unprotected sex could rigger an epidemic.
Doctors have been unable to treat patients with antibiotic ceftriaxone and azithromycin.
And sufferers have been left with a gonorrhoea – also known as the clap – infection that causes extreme pain during urination.
Australia’s federal government has issued a report warning of the risk of the “continuing threat of antimicrobial resistance by dangerous bacteria”.
Officials added another five strains of gonorrhoea have been found which have “high level resistance” to treatments.
Scary.
Microbes and antibiotics have been at war ever since the invention of the drugs, and resistance is one of the main weapons in the kit of the bacteria.
There’s also this, which doesn’t surprise me in the least:
A common ingredient in toothpaste and hand wash could be contributing to antibiotic resistance, according to University of Queensland research.
A study led by Dr Jianhua Guo from UQ’s Advanced Water Management Centre focused on triclosan, a compound used in more than 2000 personal care products.
Dr Guo said while it was well-known the overuse and misuse of antibiotics could create ‘superbugs’, researchers were unaware that other chemicals could also induce antibiotic resistance until now.
“Wastewater from residential areas has similar or even higher levels of antibiotic resistant bacteria and antibiotic resistance genes compared to hospitals, where you would expect greater antibiotic concentrations,” he said.
Triclosan is banned in the US:
The antibacterial compound triclosan, already banned in the U.S. from consumer soaps, will no longer be allowed in antiseptic products used in hospitals and other health care settings. The U.S. Food & Drug Administration on Dec. 20 [2017] deemed triclosan and 23 other antiseptic ingredients to not be generally recognized as safe and effective.
“There was a lack of sufficient safety and efficacy data” for the 24 affected chemicals, explains FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb.
I remember years ago when these antibacterial soaps came into vogue. I was suspicious of them from the start, because it seemed to me to be (quite literally) overkill. Washing hands properly gets rid of some surface bacteria, but the idea that in normal life our hands can ever be especially free of bacteria seemed preposterous.
And how many people don’t wash their hands at all after using the toilet? Plenty (you can look it up). But when they do wash their hands and use these particular agents, I am pretty sure their hands are repopulated quite quickly.
And it stands to reason there would be some sort of bacterial resistance developing to these chemicals. That’s the nature of the struggle for existence, and bacteria have such a short life and exist in such huge quantities that natural selection can operate to allow the most resistant to survive.
And then, on to the next weapon in our arsenal.
Our liberal abuse of risk management protocols to normalize dysfunctional and even lethal behaviors has forced artificial selection in ever more constrained frames. This is good for antigens, and social progress in the short-term, but also a foundation for instability and dodo dynasties. Conservation would go a long way to ensure healthy, viable ducks.
n.n,
Read your comment three times. Still don’t understand it. Care to elaborate?
“with fears rampant unprotected sex could rigger an epidemic.”
Much in the way that the Russians rigger elections.
“And how many people don’t wash their hands at all after using the toilet? ”
Young man [after seeing Churchill leave the bathroom without washing his hands]: At Eton, they taught us to wash our hands after using the toilet.
Churchill: At Harrow, they taught us not to piss on our hands.
Roy, I’m thinking n.n.. is just very clever spam.
But perhaps our host knows otherwise.
“…left with a gonorrhoea – also known as the clap – infection…”
Does this sound professional to you? What’s the purpose of inserting the slang name of this disease into the story?! It’s just bizarre.
When I worked for seven years at an inner-city ER, the diagnosis written on charts was the abbreviation “GC,” for “gonococci.” I was surprised at how often this occurred.
However, I’m old enough to remember how when “the pill” came into common use, more or less accompanied by the IUD, resort to a condom seemed unnecessary. We (I include myself) had little fear of STDs (a term unknown then) and were not about to suppress or limit our pleasure. Condom use only began a comeback in the 1980s when AIDS made noise.
I know I was uninterested, and I look back at a crush I had on one promiscuous, intelligent, very difficult young woman. We slept together twice without having sex. A previous boyfriend of hers had been a bartender who dealt cocaine. Sue — that was her name — was a leader in the new feminism that, well… she used to go to clubs by herself in order to pick up attractive males for one-night stands. She was, in other words, a member of the sexual avant-garde.
I may have dodged a bullet there.
Oh, but I really wanted her at the time. “Bad girls” were exciting to me then.
I remember hearing about “black syphilis” in the 70s — a strain of syphilis far more virulent than regular syphilis and untreatable which had emerged in East Asia and was infecting American soldiers in Vietnam.
Nothing seems to have come of it, assuming it actually existed.
The religion of science, gotta love it until you die of it at least.
I’m surprised to see the triclosan ban as of last year – didn’t hear about this at all. I used to work at a place that, among other things, made such antibacterial soaps now and then. I did assays for the content of triclosan and chloroxylenol. Thus, I was a little taken aback to hear of it only this late.
The lack-of-efficacy rationale from the FDA is less impressive to me (though it may indeed be true) than the agency’s having taken note of the development of resistance in the bacterial population partly as a consequence of ubiquity of these compounds.
One thing people refuse to learn is that the rubrics in place when my grandparents generation were Chesterton’s fence for the religious and areligious alike. Pretty much the same rubrics were in place when my parents came of age, with the addendum that men had some franchise to feel their oats when they were in the military and tended to sort women into Category A which you might consider for discreet fornication and Category B that you’d consider for marriage. For an attractive woman like my aunt, it was socially acceptable to be ‘hot’, but never to be ‘cheap’. The lives they led had many irritations and disappointments, but still compare favorably to the mess that succeeding generations have made of their social worlds.
Back in the 60s, when I was a corpsman serving in Japan, we used to get some patients come into our dispensary with venereal diseases that were pretty resistant to Penicillin—pretty much all we used to treat it back then. If I remember correctly, the patients who had been stationed in Korea had the wildest, drug-resistant versions.
Back then, the thought was that, since you could go off base some places in East and SE Asia and buy Penicillin at pharmacies without a prescription, or pick some supposed “Penicillin” up cheaply on the black market, a lot of these GIs were avoiding the embarrassment of showing up at our dispensary for our weekly “VD Clinic” by self medicating with what they thought was “Penicillin” but wasn’t, or the “Penicillin” they got was cut to increase the seller’s profits, so they didn’t get the full dose they thought they were getting, or, if they got the real deal, they didn’t follow the dosing directions, and stopped treatment too early.
All this added up to strains of venereal diseases that were increasingly resistant to Penicillin.
Snow on Pine: That’s practically the plot of “The Third Man.”
[Harry] Lime had been stealing penicillin from military hospitals, and selling it on the black market diluted so much that many patients died. In postwar Vienna, antibiotics were new and scarce outside military hospitals and commanded a very high price.
–https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_Man
Huxley–You’re right. I shoulda though of that myself.
I never could understand how, in some–I don’t know how many that might still be–countries, you can just stroll into a “pharmacy,” and pick stuff off the shelves that a pharmacy in the U.S. would never sell to you without a prescription.
Self diagnosis and self medicating? Not a good idea.
Have you seen all the ads on TV for increasingly powerful drugs–with many and horrific side effects–for what, in many cases, are not life threatening illnesses, but almost seem–at least to me–more like annoyances.
But, of course, if you think you have an illness/condition, it can seem like the most horrible thing in the world to you, can dominate your thoughts; a condition that you will do almost anything to banish, try any supposed cure, if it will rid you of the problem.
That’s why it’s good to go to a Doctor, so you get someone who is objective to evaluate the seriousness of whatever ails you, or to reassure you that it’s normal, and nothing to worry about.
At that same military dispensary in Japan–right in the middle of a base housing thousand’s of military wives and their families–we used to dread each new monthly Readers Digest, because almost inevitably there would be an article in one of those months about a new “miracle cure” that had been discovered–monkey glands, say.
And it was pretty likely that someone would come in, waving the article, asking how come our doctors didn’t have this latest, cutting edge “cure.”
When bacteria develops a resistance to being doused with alcohol, then we’re screwed.
Our little dispensary had working surfaces that were made of stainless steel, and one of the jobs we had to do between patients was to clean those surfaces with alcohol wipes.
Lately, I believe that I’ve seen articles talking about current research showing that bacteria can survive on metal surfaces (kitchen and otherwise) for quite some time–don’t know about the alcohol though.
I’d guess that these bacteria could be a mild version of some of the newly discovered “extremophile” bacteria, discovered existing in the boiling water over deep ocean lava vents, or deep within Arctic soil, where the temperatures are way, way below zero.
This discovery of extremophile bacteria has major implications for the search for extraterrestrial life, since it widens and tremendously expands the conditions under which life could evolve and live i.e. the potential number of planets (and perhaps other celestial bodies as well) on which life of some kind could possibly evolve just grew by several orders of magnitude.
The Planetary Habitability Laboratory at the University of Puerto Rico website says that, as of now, they estimate that there are somewhere between 130-160 habitable planets in our neck of the woods i.e. within 33 light years of the Earth.
Expand the search out to our “stellar neighborhood” of around 27,000 light years within our Milky Way Galaxy, and that estimated number of habitable planets increases to around 50 billion planets.
This, of course, runs into “Fermi Paradox” i.e. if there are so many planets that may have developed life, and on some of those planets a civilization has arisen (and survived) that is sufficiently developed to have the ability and the drive to leave their solar system, and to explore, (maybe) we haven’t run into them, or them us.
So, as Fermi asked, “where is everybody.”
I’d guess that these bacteria could be a mild version of some of the newly discovered “extremophile” bacteria,
Chemosynthetic bacteria were referred to in my high school biology class nearly 40 years ago. I don’t think it’s a new discovery.
Only in my own life span, there have have been more than a dozen “end of the world as we know it” disaster predictions. We were told that we were in immediate and grave danger of extinction or extreme depopulation due to:
Overpopulation
Polution
Income inequality
Depletion of the Ozone Layer
HIV/AIDS
African Killer Bees
Soil Depletion
Y2K
Ebola
Global Warming
Etc…
This is nothing new. About two hundred years ago there was an article produce by a “Naturalist” named Thomas Malthus. He predicted the end of human civilization due to overpopulation. He even calculated an approximate date (1920). He based all of this on population projections, the amount of arable land on the planet, and the amount of food that could be produced per acre. Needless to say, his predictions did not pan out. But, at the time, they had a lot of people worried and there were demands for immediate and drastic action by the government.
And this is always the common thread of such claims: “There is a dire threat and therefore we need government money and action to study this further and look for solutions.” This, in turn, is used as the reasoning to increase taxes and concentrate more power in the hands of government.
Anyway, so far, I have survived all of the “end of the world” predictions and the only thing that happened was that taxes increased and government got bigger.
The whole bacterial wipes thing is crazy. Use of them ought to be limited to hospitals, where the risk of deadly infection is greater.
For most of life – use water & soap. Water alone will get rid of nearly all bacteria, the soap just improves on that efficiency.
Antibacterials are bad, because:
– they contain alcohol, which dries out the skin, and can cause cracking and other damage, leading to surfaces susceptible to invasion by microbes.
– when they wipe out ALL bacteria, they also wipe out the GOOD bacteria. That leaves a void in the ecosystem of your skin, and makes it vulnerable to colonization by BAD bacteria.
– they increase bacterial resistance.
– they are costly.
The only time such measures should be used is when a bacterial infection has entered the environment, causing illness. When the flu hits, yes, use anti-bacterials. Once the infection abates, return to normal procedures.
Sounds pretty awful.
Speaking as a person who, as a virgin, married a virgin, and remains happily married to her a quarter-century later, I’m tempted — tempted, I say — to thumb my nose and chant, “nyah, nyah, nya-nyah nyaaaaah.”
Or maybe to just observe: “Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas.”
I acknowledge: That response would be a bit petty. Sorry.
Still….
Once upon a time, there was a widespread notion that you should only sleep with a person if you were interested in being married to them, being the other parent of their children, and ultimately being the doting and spoiling grandparent of their grandchildren. That particular notion — setting aside any questions of divine sanction or whatnot — evolved to a settled practice over a quarter-million years of human social evolution.
And then, like a bunch of French Revolutionaries instituting a 10-day week, we started abolishing all that starting around 1930 or so at the Anglicans’ Lambeth Conference (a much more consequential event then than now), and coming to a climax sometime around the Summer of “Love.”
So. How’s that workin’ for ya’?