Subject:
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Re: What's the point of wearing rubber gloves...
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.debate
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Date:
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Thu, 29 Jul 2004 21:31:33 GMT
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Viewed:
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1012 times
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In lugnet.off-topic.debate, Larry Pieniazek wrote:
> I'll go farther. Swifferization, overmedication, and anti-bacterial soaps
> strike me as bad things. We're training (via natural selection) the bacteria
> to be hardier. Strikes me as a bad long term strategy.
Yes and no. There has been some interesting research into this (I think I saw
it on Scientific American Frontiers, but I'm not positive about that), and what
they've found is that the more hardy germs become in terms of surviving all
those nasty antibiotics we throw at them, the more their biological resources
have to be pulled away from other functions. The result is that if you stop
using a particular antibiotic for a few years, "survival of the fittest" takes
over, and their resistence breeds itself out until they're back where they
started before you first used it. This means that as long as you have a nice
array of antibiotics, you should be able to rotate through to the next one each
time the previous becomes ineffective, and by the time you get back to the first
one it should work as well as any new equivalent you could come up with.
The problem we have is that a few people get viral diseases and go to every
doctor in town to get as many different antibiotics as possible (never mind the
fact that none of them will do anything to a virus), and they're simultaneously
introducing any germs in their system to a wide variety of antibiotics at the
same time. What few are left after wading through them all are now able to
breed supergerms that are immune to many different antibiotics, and you might
not have enough left to breed out the immunity before you've cycled back to the
beginning. Especially if you can't get people to stop using antibiotics for
stuff like colds and flus.
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