For the first time, researchers have found a person in the United States carrying bacteria resistant to antibiotics of last resort, an alarming development that the top U.S. public health official says could signal “the end of the road” for antibiotics.
The antibiotic-resistant strain was found last month in the urine of a 49-year-old Pennsylvania woman. Defense Department researchers determined that she carried a strain of E. coli resistant to the antibiotic colistin, according to a study published Thursday in Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy, a publication of the American Society for Microbiology. The authors wrote that the discovery “heralds the emergence of a truly pan-drug resistant bacteria.”
Colistin is the antibiotic of last resort for particularly dangerous types of superbugs, including a family of bacteria known as carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae, or CRE, which health officials have dubbed “nightmare bacteria.” In some instances, these superbugs kill up to 50 percent of patients who become infected. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has called CRE among the country’s most urgent public health threats…
Infectious disease experts say the antibiotic-resistant gene, which can be transferred from bacteria to bacteria, has been found mostly in livestock but also in humans. It is likely leaping from livestock to humans through food, said Yohei Doi, an infectious disease doctor at the University of Pittsburgh who has studied the problem…
It would be interesting to know whether the plasmid carrying the gene can survive the heat of cooking and the stomach acid better than the microbes which presently carry it, allowing it to then transfect a native bacterium in the gastrointestinal tract. If so, it might be wise in the Apocalypse to avoid sausage and other mystery meat products, even if fully cooked.
Disease usually culls the population for those who exhibit disgust, an amygdala-mediated function. It will also tend to cull those who lack the discipline to maintain their health – something which will also tend to be driven by amygdala. The trannies, gays, lower IQ’s, filthy hippies, leftist ideologues, and sexually promiscuous will all fare quite badly.
As it moves through the population, it will also stimulate the remaining amygdalae, as the perception of disease ever-presence and the resultant fear of it stimulates disgust behavior, developing the amygdala and pushing toward K from that angle.
It is also worth noting that the gene appears to have developed from people striving to increase feed conversions and overall yield by administering antibiotics to livestock, in an effort to produce freer resources.
One of the strange paradoxes is how in so many ways, r-strategists sow the seeds of K and create their own demise, just as K-strategists, by producing greatness and safety, sow the seeds of r and generate their own demise.
[…] The Last Superbug Gene Is Here […]
AC, So many places to go.
1. For instance, in that hygiene area. The life expectancy of Western Man nearly doubled in the lat 1800’s, early 1900’s all based on better sanitation and better nutrition. This predates the new techniques in medicine, or antibiotics. This will be coming back. Make sure you wash your hands everybody, and cook your food. Aboriginal humans in the Brazilian Rain forest live into their 70’s. Staying alive that long is a result of proper hygiene, and diet, not modern medicine.
2. It may have been here, but somewhere I read that in the 60’s hedonistic hippy culture, they were seeing diseases that doctors hadn’t seen before. That were only known through historical accounts. Things like scabies. These had been virtually eliminated (see #1) but were coming back because of poor sanitation and health behaviors.
3. It might mean we develop more vaccines. In Russia they vaccinated everyone for TB. It was the only way to bring it under control in the old USSR, and by most accounts it worked. This could be coming for more of our bacteria. Sure we will still get it, but the ability to defeat it and kill it is important.
It would also be wise to limit, or give up completely, your alcohol or drug consumption habits.
You’ll need a clear mind for the Apocalypse.
Made a note to myself this morning saying the same thing. No drugs, thankfully, but damn do I too often use the bottle to take the edge off of life in this cesspool.
PS: your handle makes me chuckle every time. I’m a budding fogey, from the beach just north of yours.
The paradox you spoke of, at the end of the post, is something long noted by the ancients. The great Taoist philosopher Lao Tsu wrote that all things “bring forth their opposites”: life and death, light and darkness, good fortune and bad fortune. r and K are no different.
”One of the strange paradoxes is how in so many ways, r-strategists sow the seeds of K and create their own demise, just as K-strategists, by producing greatness and safety, sow the seeds of r and generate their own demise.”
That’s how humanity manages to be widespread and high-quality overall. Its a strange symbiotic relationship.
your post made me think of something transcendent. understanding the dynamic of how k-sel leads to r and how r leads to k is important and gives smiles to those of us awaiting the cleansing.
it is possible to glean from these lessons a plan for stopping the cycle once we get to a k golden era? thinking of my own upbringing and the Mormons for another example i see how a mentality of planning ahead for crisis during times of plenty and relative success and ease keeps a society from going r even in the presence of great wealth and material comfort.
we almost need to table the discussion of the present and understanding of the narcissism and r psychology as it is essentially repetitive and focus on describing a future after the fall and rebuilding where this will not happen again. is it not enough that we have ancient societies and our current for the impetus to leave a guide for a future that we will not see?
I periodically let my thoughts drift to the cosmos, and any civilizations that have come before us. Somewhere out there, I believe, will be civilizations that have come through where we are now, and eventually developed into civilizations that will last nearly forever. My guess is they will have somehow incorporated coming of age ceremonies for all young, some sort of religious aversion to hedonism, and a fervent will to expel rabbits. I get that far in my thinking, picture how awesome their productivity would be, the amazing things they would invent, the awe of their exploratory endeavors with their technology, and then I realize all of that would be dopamine (or their equivalent), and it would be pushing them to r.
The only thing I can come up with is the idea of some sort of reclusive colonizer model, akin to forest dwelling libertarians here, being able to break away from a society as it collapses into r, head out into space, and volitionally deal only with others of their type in a fluid socializing environment. When I see them though, I see them as more numerous, lone reclusive explorers, than a great city building civilization.
Unless you could codify the ability of everyone to only form volitional governmental relationships with the people of their choosing (creating parallel governments for liberals, conservatives, libertarians, etc), I think your society will always decay back to r for the reasons you cited.
It may be possible that given the hostility of space to life and the perpetual resource scarcity thereof. It may prove a permanent K environment of which mankind will truly become something amazing.
I’m the most conservative* person I know, yet you keep giving me hope that there are many others out there like me. Your writings galvanize us, it seems.
* excluding the “Just kill ’em all!” crowd
There are a lot of others like you. We are just all in hibernation, dulled by dopamine. I think if we had lived through a tumult, like the revolution, and felt the exhilaration of seeing history, and then we saw everything now, it would feel as if we were drugged right now.
The present situation can’t go on forever. The debt will catch up to us, and when it does, that dopamine will go away, we’ll have a period of withdrawal, and then the fog will clear. When it does, you’ll see your kind all around you, as everyone comes out of their hibernation and wakes up to the historic period we’ll see.