antibiotics •

Quick Blood Test for Bacteria

July 7, 2016 By Deborah Nielsen Leave a Comment

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Researchers developed a quick blood test to discern between bacteria and viruses.

A quick blood test would be enough to tell someone if their medical condition requires an antibiotic treatment or not.

The experts warned long time ago that antibiotics are used more than necessary, and they are also prescribed for viral infections, over which they have no power.

A team of scientists has been working on a method to test whether an infection is caused by a bacterium or by a virus. The research is especially useful for family physicians, which could be able to discern between patients that need antibiotics and those that do not need this type of treatment.

The quick blood test involves gene responses, and the results will be available in just an hour.

Such a test would prevent the risk of creating antibiotic resistance in the population. Another advantage would be the fact that the patient will avoid the secondary effects of antibiotic use.

Among the unwanted effects of antibiotics, the authors remind tendon ruptures, kidney damages, or changes in the normal bacterial flora that resides in the gut.

The medical experts explain that the abuse of antibiotics is the primary cause for the apparition of the antibiotic-resistant bacteria, which can be treated with difficulty as it developed with protection against all the known medicine.

The spread of such new type of bacteria could lead to a series of incurable diseases. It had been estimated that the emergence of new diseases would cause by 2050 a $100 trillion loss in the gross domestic product all over the world.

The officials recommend doctors to be careful in correctly diagnosing a bacterial infection and to prescribe antibiotics only in proper cases. However, it is difficult for physicians to tell whether a medical condition is caused by a bacteria or a virus.

As the symptoms are very similar, the researchers turned to the gene expression. The cell extracts information from genes and it expresses it in RNA. When the organism fights an infection, the cell mirrors the molecules differently.

The team of scientists reports they discovered different responses in the two cases. The test was used on 96 critically ill children in Nepal, and it requires only seven genes to detect whether the infection is viral or bacterial.

Even if the quick block test proved to be correct when tested on complicated medical conditions such as the ones in Nepal, in order to make it available for doctors the scientists need to be incorporated in a special device.

In the meantime, the general population is advised to be careful with infections that are caused by viruses, such as colds, flu, bronchitis, sinus infections, which do not need antibiotic treatment but still a visit to the doctor in necessary in order to obtain a correct cure and to avoid complications.

Image Source: Public Domain Image

One in Three Antibiotic Prescriptions Is Unnecessary

May 4, 2016 By Deborah Nielsen Leave a Comment

We’ve grown too accustomed to antibiotics, and we now see them as the answer to everything

Most of us have heard since we were little that if you don’t take them only when needed, you can develop resistance to antibiotics. At least that’s what was going on in my household. In fact, things are little different. You don’t become resistant to the antibiotics, the germs you’re attempting to fight do.

This can also sometimes happen when the medicine is taken correctly, so if you take antibiotics without needing them you risk giving birth to antibiotic-resistant super bacteria. These types of germs can be fatal, and often are, even though creating them can be very easily prevented.

Unfortunately, even though most doctors know about this, they still recommend plenty of antibiotics to people who don’t really need them. And this only serves to empower more and more bacterial strains. In fact, the situation is so bad that one in three antibiotic prescriptions is unnecessary.

That means that about 47 million unnecessary antibiotic prescriptions are given to United States citizens every year. And according to the study, most of these are given for conditions that don’t even benefit from antibiotics – conditions like colds, the flu, bronchitis, sore throats, and other similarly mostly harmless diseases.

For the study, the team of researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Pew Charitable Trust looked over data from previous CDC studies, and analyzed the antibiotic use for the years 2010 and 2011. They revealed some pretty concerning statistics related to negligent antibiotic prescriptions.

Around 154 million visits to the doctor each year (about 13 percent) end with an antibiotic prescription. Half of these are pointless, since they are prescribed for viral illnesses. About four out of ten (44 percent) of these prescriptions are given to patients with acute respiratory conditions like pneumonia, asthma, allergies, and sinus infections.

Medical experts are growing increasingly concerned with this habit, as it has started leading to a concerning number of deaths and untreatable infections. In fact, antibiotic-resistant bacteria already cause some two million illnesses every year and are responsible for some 23,000 death every year in the United States alone.

The White House has announced a plan last year to reduce these terrifying numbers to half by 2020. If they were to succeed, that would mean somewhere around 23 million fewer antibiotics prescribed every year. And that is a genuinely worrying number, particularly for physicians who should know that what they’re doing is dangerous.

According to the researchers, the reason as to why so many antibiotics are inappropriately prescribed is because doctors are concerned about patient satisfaction, so if the patients demand antibiotics, they usually get them. Plus, the study didn’t even consider the number of antibiotics prescribed by nurse practitioners, physician assistants, pharmacists, or by any other profession other than doctors, so you know the numbers are, in fact, much worse.

Image source: Pixabay

Could Beards Really Be The Source Of Antibiotics Of The Future?

February 4, 2016 By Brian Galloway Leave a Comment

True story: bacteria from beards may help create antibiotics.

The most recent and rumored question on the Internet is: Could beards be the source of antibiotics of the future?

This interesting new discovery has a very funny story: it started out as a joke, made by actor Will Forte, who stars in The last man on Earth TV series and who said that men’s beards contain traces of… poop. So, as the microbiologist Adam Roberts, from University College London went digging through men’s beards in search of poop, he found something else – a tantalizing suggestion of a breakthrough in the global fight against drug-resistant infections.

The research began, as very few good things do, with a fake viral story from the Internet. Dr. Adam Roberts said that subsequently they carried out tests on the samples as a part of the research into new antibiotics.

What we do is grid out the individual bacteria on an agar plate which has been pre-inoculated with an indicator strain. And then we see if that indicator strain can grow right up to the individual colonies from the beards or from anywhere else.

affirmed Roberts.

Therefore, swab samples were taken from 20 beards and in them at least 100 bacteria growths were detected.

Amazingly, about 25 percent of beard isolates started killing off the indicator strains. They were producing their own antibiotics, Roberts said.

Furthermore, Roberts has been asking public to send swab samples to his laboratory. He has unveiled about receiving different samples from all over the nation, which include from child’s trampolines, to fridges, to cats. According to the doctor, they have now around 50 different bacteria that is able to kill many indicator strains, including E.coli and Candida albicans (yeast infections) and MRSA (Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus).

Although the results are crucial for developing new future antibiotics, it is a long and expensive process. Even if Roberts discovered an entirely new type of antimicrobial tomorrow, it would take at least 10 years and millions of dollars before the drug ended up on the market – this is how the system works.

Still, the discovery made by Dr. Roberts and his fellow researches that men’s beards do not contain evidence of poop, but do host antibiotics is an important step in the process of developing new antibiotics to combat superbugs.

Image Source: www.urbanbeardsman.com.

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