Antibiotics
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Feeding A Disease With Fake Drugs
Thanks to billions of dollars spent on diagnosis and treatment [for tuberculosis] over the past decade, deaths and infections are slowly declining. Yet a disturbing phenomenon has emerged that could not only reverse any gains we’ve made, but also encourage the spread of a newly resistant form of the disease. Read More »
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Got Milk? Got Drugs? Got Both?: State Responds After Idaho Dairy Cattle Test Positive In Food Safety Tests
The [FDA] is worried about what it calls an "important potential public health issue." It could be in your latte or your child's bowl of breakfast cereal. It could be in your refrigerator or freezer. At the very least, the FDA wants to make certain that it's not in any of the 8 million milk-producing cattle in the United States or the 500,000 dairy cows in Idaho. Read More »
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Hospital Antibiotic Use Can Put Patients At Risk, Study Says
Doctors in some hospitals prescribe up to three times as many antibiotics as doctors at other hospitals, putting patients at greater risk for deadly superbug infections, according to a federal study released Tuesday. Read More »
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Hospitals Try Yogurt To Prevent Infections In Patients
At Holy Redeemer Hospital in Meadowbrook, Pa., a worrisome trend emerged in 2011: an uptick in cases of one of the most virulent hospital infections, despite measures to battle the bug by scrubbing surfaces with bleach and isolating affected patients. Read More »
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Hospitals' Struggles To Beat Back Familiar Infections Before Ebola Arrived
While Ebola stokes public anxiety, more than one in six hospitals – including some top medical centers – are having trouble stamping out less exotic but sometimes deadly infections, federal records show...
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How a Bee Sting Saved My Life: Testimony From a Lyme Disease Patient
Ellie Lobel was 27 when she was bitten by a tick and contracted Lyme disease. And she was not yet 45 when she decided to give up fighting for survival. Caused by corkscrew-shaped bacteria called Borrelia burgdorferi, which enter the body through the bite of a tick, Lyme disease is diagnosed in around 300,000 people every year in the United States. It kills almost none of these people, and is by and large curable - if caught in time...
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How Industrial Agriculture Has Thwarted Factory Farm Reforms
In an interview with Yale Environment 360, Robert Martin, co-author of a recent study on industrial farm animal production, explains how a powerful and intransigent agriculture lobby has successfully fought off attempts to reduce the harmful environmental and health impacts of mass livestock production. Read More »
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How the Gut Microbiome May be Key in Post-Surgery Organ Failure after Heart Surgery in Children
University of Arizona pediatric critical care physician-scientist Katri Typpo, MD, wants to improve the health of infants and children with congenital heart disease (CHD). These patients often suffer organ failure after heart repair surgery. Toward that end, Dr. Typpo, assistant professor, UA Department of Pediatrics and the UA Steele Children’s Research Center at the UA College of Medicine - Tucson, within the University of Arizona Health Sciences, was awarded a four-year, $740,000, K23 “Mentored Patient-Oriented Research Career Development” grant by the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases...
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How We Could Kill Superbugs Without Antibiotics
Antibiotics will soon be useless, but U.K. scientists have come up with a new way to kill bacteria—and it's not with a drug. And perhaps the best thing about this approach is that bacteria may not be able to build resistance against it. A team from the University of East Anglia, publishing in the journal Nature, figured out that the key to destroying bacteria is understanding how they build their defensive walls. It’s like ruining an astronaut’s space suit instead of going after the astronauts inside...
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If Things Weren’t Already Bad Enough, Houston Is About to Face a Public Health Nightmare
In the coming weeks and even months, residents of Houston and other parts of southern Texas hit hard by Hurricane Harvey will be faced with the public health disasters that can result from dirty floodwater and landslides. The natural disaster has ostensibly turned the city into a sprawling, pathogen-infested swamp...
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In The Belly Of The Beast
Sarah – let’s call her that for this story, though it’s neither the name her parents gave her nor the one she currently uses undercover – is a tall, fair woman in her midtwenties who’s pretty in a stock, anonymous way, as if she’d purposely scrubbed her face and frame of distinguishing characteristics. [...] It’s the worst job she or anyone else has had, but Sarah isn’t grousing about the conditions. She’s too busy waging war on the hogs’ behalf. Read More »
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Is "Modern Medicine" Indistinguishable From Magic?
Evidently, most of health care's technologies are not yet sufficiently advanced. For example, just think about chemotherapy. We've spent lots of money developing ever more powerful, always more expensive, hopefully more precise drugs to combat cancers. In many cases they've helped improve cancer patients' lifespans -- adding months or even years of life. But few who take them would say the drugs are without noticeable side effects -- e.g., patients often suffer nausea, vomiting, hair loss, fatigue, appetite loss, sexual issues, or a mental fog that is literally called "chemo brain."...
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Is The US Meat Industry Pushing Us Into A ‘Post-Antibiotic Era’?
...Big Meat’s rampant use of antibiotics is one of the most worrying aspects of the meat industry, an issue that unites public health advocates, doctors, consumers, and others in shared concern...
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Killing Superbugs with Star-Shaped Polymers, not Antibiotics
Tiny, star-shaped molecules are effective at killing bacteria that can no longer be killed by current antibiotics, new research shows. The study, published today in Nature Microbiology, holds promise for a new treatment method against antibiotic-resistant bacteria (commonly known as superbugs). The star-shaped structures, are short chains of proteins called ‘peptide polymers’, and were created by a team from the Melbourne School of Engineering...
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Latest “Red Meat Study” Doubly Flawed
No, meat is not unsafe—nor is L-carnitine.A recent study published in the journal Nature Medicine associates the amino acid L-carnitine, found in red meat, supplements, and sports supplements, with the risk of heart disease. Read More »
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