superbug (Page 7)

An unknown disease is hitting Los Angeles, San Francisco,Austin and other areas, and ifit’s not actually a new disease, doctors think it must bemass hysteria. People are getting lesions on their bodiesthat are filledwith strange, string-like fibers. The lesions start out asitchy bumps. Given the fact that leisons appear, as well asparasite-like fibers, it is hard to see how a diagnosis ofhysteria can stand.

When anurse suffering from the disease went to the hospital tohave it treated, she was almost sent to a mentalinstitution. A male medical assistant was driven so crazy bythe lesions, he committed suicide. His girlfriend now hassymptoms.
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BBC reports that doctors at Christie Hospital in Manchester,England have solved a problem that has made hospitals allover the world dangerous places to be. The problem: Whenthey treat dangerous bacteria, hospitals create somethingeven more dangerous—superbugs which cannot be killed. Thismeans you can come out of the hospital even sicker than youwere when you went in.
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Superbugs?bacteria that have become resistant to allantibiotics?are usually found in hospitals, where lots ofantibiotics are used and bugs eventually evolve that cannotbe killed by the drugs. This means you can be sicker comingout of the hospital than you were going in. Doctors andhealth authorities have always worried that these superbugswould escape from the hospital into the public realm?and nowit’s happening.

Megan Rauscher writes in planetark.com thatantibiotic-resistant germs that cause skin infections andpneumonia in otherwise healthy children and adults are onthe loose. In Corpus Christi, Texas, infections in children”has now reached epidemic proportions,” according to Dr.Kevin Purcell.
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Russian researcher Alexander Sulakvelidze came to the U.S. after Communism ended because “There was nothing left to do. Good scientists would come to work and spend all day playing cards and chess.” When he arrived at the University of Maryland Medical Center, he discovered the hospital was in the midst of a crisis that Soviet scientists had already solved.

Richard Martin writes in Wired that the Enterococcus bacteria was showing signs of resistance to vancomycin, the antibiotic of last resort. Between 1992 and 1994, vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus (VRE) infected 75 patients, killing 6 of them. 20% of the patients had VRE in their bloodstreams. The cause of the epidemic was an overuse of antibiotics.
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