DR. REBECCA'S HEALTHY PLANET: Antibiotic Resistance

Showing posts with label Antibiotic Resistance. Show all posts

Wednesday, December 28, 2011

What you do in the name of "health" may not be so healthy

The most recent issue of Johns Hopkins Magazine (Winter 2011) discusses many of the ideas we have been discussing in our posts. Diet, food allergies, soy, antibiotic resistance, soap, over the counter medications, exercise, and dietary supplements are all fair game in this sweeping look at things that both Allopathic medicine and CAM practitioners get right and wrong.

So let’s look at what Johns Hopkins had to say...

Ulcers and Other Stomach Acid Related Problems

With the holiday season upon us, you may be all to familiar with the prospect of digestive problems like heartburn or stomach pain. While stomach pain and heartburn may only be due to a simple case of overeating, they could be indicative of a more serious problem, like acid reflux or gastrointestinal ulcers. Based on the sales of drugs that treat these symptoms, it is clearly a widespread problem that affects millions of people.

When we feel stomach discomfort, there are now so many over the counter preparations available to decrease stomach acid and promise you relief that it is easy to just pop a pill and ignore the possibility of a more serious underlying problem. Unfortunately, approaching stomach pain or digestive problems by simply masking the symptoms can lead to increasingly severe problems. Furthermore, are these medications even safe to use?

Preventing and Treating the Common Cold and the Flu

The rhinovirus, microscopic view and magnified
plushy view.

Cold season is in full swing here in the United States, so I wanted to discuss what we can do to prevent and treat this annoying and sometimes dangerous illness. Since the common cold (the rhinovirus), is the single most infectious disease on the planet, it is not easy to avoid. The reason this particular virus is so infectious is because it can mutate quickly, often allowing dozens of variants to develop and co-exist at the same time. The influenza virus (the flu) also mutates and this is the reason that there is a different flu vaccine every year. Vaccine manufacturers are basically trying to guess which influenza variants are most likely to strike this year. Unfortunately, the common cold mutates so often and there are so many different strains that vaccinating against a cold is essentially useless.

So what else can you do to fight off a cold or the flu?

Food Poisoning - You May Not Want To Be What You Eat

Food poisoning is an illness you can’t predict or really prepare for. You just have to eat something that was somewhere it shouldn’t be for as little as a few seconds in order to get ill. Before you even really know what is happening, you feel sick (nauseated, dizzy, vomiting, abdominal cramping, and diarrhea) and may not know what is happening or what to do next.

The nausea and vomiting you may experience is your body recognizing that there is a problem and trying to find a solution (in other words finding a way to get the “bad stuff” out). For some kinds of food poisoning, you may experience diarrhea as the primary symptom and/or in addition to nausea and vomiting. Both symptoms are simply a means to an end, so to speak; that is, getting the offending piece of food (and accompanying poison) out of your body, usually as quickly as possible and by the nearest exit. Obviously, our first instincts are to stop our unpleasant symptoms as quickly as possible, but this is usually not be best idea in the long run; usually, the best way for your body to rid itself of the problem is to let nature take its course.

The real risks of food poisoning are not that you feel awful or that you spend a lot of time in the bathroom, the problem is the secondary complications. Some complications are obvious - you can get dehydrated from too much vomiting or diarrhea. Hence the deadly nature of cholera which causes diarrhea that is so severe that the accompanying dehydration is often fatal, especially in younger children. Other complications that are serious and potentially life threatening have to do with the type of microbe or poison that caused the food poisoning in the first place.

So what to do to protect yourself if you are unfortunate enough to suffer food poisoning?

Bacteria on the Beach - The Seagull Menace

Antibiotic-resistant super-bugs aren’t just a problem in hospitals anymore. Unlike the antibiotic resistant bacteria we discussed previously, antibiotic misuse may not be the culprit. But, spending an afternoon at the beach may give you more than you bargained for.

Wired Magazine’s blog reported on a study that tries to determine what is causing the rapid and unpredictable spread of multiple-antibiotic resistant E. coli bacteria in Miami Beach, Florida. The answer may give us clues as to how resistant bacteria spread world wide.

Apparently, seagulls are becoming carriers (literally) of drug resistant strains of E. coli. Let’s face it, seagulls will eat just about anything. Just driving through a coastal city, you can see seagulls dumpster diving for a meal, fighting over scraps of trash to eat, and that’s just what we see. It’s not much of a stretch to imagine that they could eat something contaminated with E. coli. Once they get E. coli inside of them, the bacteria can mutate or simply “learn” resistance to antibiotics from other bacteria. Then, not only are they carrying this highly antibiotic resistant strain everywhere they fly, but they also drop off little colonies of them everywhere they go (in the form of poop).

The specific resistances of the bacteria in this study are called “extended-spectrum ß-lactamase” (ESBL) resistance. This mutation allows the bacteria to resist most of the commonly used antibacterial drugs. While E. coli itself is usually not deadly (with the exception of the O157:H7 strain), the spread of the resistant genes in any bacteria is cause for concern.

The dangers of a highly mobile (thanks to the seagulls) multi-drug resistant strain of bacteria are pretty clear. The more places these bacteria are “deposited”, the more likely it is that the antibiotic resistant genes will work their way into other local bacteria through the process of horizontal gene transfer. Suddenly, communities could face outbreaks of several different bacterial infections that are untreatable by most antibiotics.

A quick review of the literature shows that this is not just a local phenomenon in Florida. The very same resistant strains of E. coli have popped up around the world, documented in places all over the world like Sweden, Alaska, France, Portugal, and the United Kingdom, to name a few. In most of these cases, birds were suspected to be the culprits responsible for the unexpected spread of resistant bacteria. Drug resistant bacteria has been linked to birds (chickens) before, but seagulls are far more mobile than chickens and so present a much bigger problem.

This research sheds light on how antibiotic strains of bacteria spread around the world. Hopefully, we will be able to learn how to prevent widespread resistance to our antibiotic arsenal. Drug resistance is a worldwide problem and hopefully, this research will help to battle against the superbugs.

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Researched and written by Dr. Rebecca Malamed, M.D. with assistance from Mr. Malcolm Potter.

Friday, July 15, 2011

Drug Resistant Gonorrhea Found

The last remaining, safe treatments for Gonorrhea are
becoming less effective as more resistant strains develop.

Wired Science has an article about Multidrug-Resistant strains of Gonorrhea, which are being found worldwide. The US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) released a report detailing the rising threat and rapidly decreasing number of treatment options available. From the Wired article:

“Now comes the CDC to say that, in a survey of gonorrhea (Neisseria gonorrhoeae) isolates from across the US between 2000 and 2010, the agency has spotted rising rates of decreasing susceptibility not only to cefixime, but also to ceftriaxone. The increases are small — from 0.2% of about 5,900 isolates per year in 2000 to 1.4% in 2010 for cefixime, and from 0.1% in 2000 to 0.3% in 2010 for ceftriaxone — but that they are occurring at all should ring an alarm bell.”

We have previously discussed anti-microbial resistance and this increasing problem. This particular increase in gonorrhea is scary because almost all of the primary treatments are showing greatly reduced efficacy. When people are treated for STDs like Gonorrhea, it is important that the treatment is both inexpensive (so clinics can afford to treat people) and as close to a one time treatment as possibe. If a patient has to do more to manage their own treatment (a full course of antibiotics, or multiple visits to a clinic), then the risks of incomplete treatments (causing even faster development of resistant strains) greatly increases. As we run out of effective treatments, less safe drugs may be the only treatment, but with greater risk of side effects.

Friday, July 8, 2011

Antibiotic Resistance from Chickens?

Image by Martin Cathrae

(For more information on this subject please read our previous post: Antibiotic Resistance: Bacteria are winning the battle against antibiotics faster than we can invent them.)

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in the US have released an article in their journal (Emerging Infectious Diseases) about antibiotic resistance. In this article, scientists link the overuse of antibiotics in livestock to an increase of resistant strains of bacteria (E. coli) in animals and also to the transmission of resistant strains to people. In this study, approximately 80% of all chicken meat samples contained drug resistant strains of E. coli... the same strains found in almost 75% of people in the study who got sick from E. coli.

Antibiotic Resistance: Bacteria are winning the battle against antibiotics faster than we can invent them.

Resistant bacteria

Antibiotics are a class of drugs meant to kill bacteria. Since their development and widespread use around the time of World War II, antibiotics have been used globally in battling bacterial illnesses. They have been shown to be powerful tools against dangerous and life threatening bacteria. Unfortunately, antibiotics are often overused or used inappropriately leading to the increasingly serious and alarming problem of antibiotic resistance.

Bacteria and other microorganisms that cause infections behave like every other living organism on the planet... they evolve through genetic mutation. The problem with bacteria is that they can divide and reproduce themselves very quickly (they can actually double in number every few hours). Every time a bacteria divides there is a chance that a genetic mutation will occur during the process of cell division. Over the course of this population explosion, a few of these bacteria can develop a mutation that renders them immune to a given antibiotic. Thus, with enough cell divisions these bacteria will eventually mutate the genes necessary to resist the antibiotic being used. Once resistance occurs, that antibiotic becomes useless and a new more powerful antibiotic must be tried against this, now more hardy and, resistant strain of bacteria.

If this picture isn't frightening enough, the genes responsible for antibiotic resistance can even be transferred between entirely different species of bacteria through a process called "horizontal gene transfer". This can lead other bacteria to develop resistance to antibiotics even if they have never been exposed to an antibiotic themselves.

DR. REBECCA'S HEALTHY PLANET

Wednesday, December 28, 2011

What you do in the name of "health" may not be so healthy

Thursday, November 10, 2011

Ulcers and Other Stomach Acid Related Problems

Friday, October 28, 2011