To Lose Your Arm Would Surely Upset Your Brain

We all know the story of antibiotics.

Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928 and there was much rejoicing.

Well, actually the rejoicing comes a little bit later, because Alexander Fleming didn't actually do anything.

In 1939, René J. Dubos came up with the world’s first real antibiotic. Tyrothricin was used to treat infected people. Yay! Oh... until it proved to be toxic for general use. Oops. Stop with the preliminary rejoicing.

Back to penicillin—Fleming’s accidental discovery was pretty much useless until 1940 when Howard Florey and Ernest Chain purified it and used it to treat diseases (though it was treating diseases experimentally until after 1943).

Rejoicing commences now? Not just yet.

Those diseases didn’t include Tuberculosis. Penicillin was still pretty useless in that area. It’s ok, though. Selman A. Waksman discovered Streptomycin in 1944, and that killed off TB just fine.

And, ever since, we’ve been creating more and more antibiotics. So now, in the present, we have some medicinal bragging rights over those unfortunate infected people of the past. Now, rather than having to amputate a limb when you scratch it and it gets infected, you can get some drugs and make the infection go away. We’ve got penicillins, tetracyclines, cephalosporins—and they all kill different types of bacteria and they all have different methods of killing. Some prevent bacteria from growing and multiplying. Others kill on contact.

And now we can resume with the rejoicing.

No. Wait. Stop. I lied.

Antibiotics are still working, but now the bacteria are getting smarter. They’re resisting. They refuse to die. Resistance is not futile. Why?

Well, they evolve. Or maybe God intelligently designs ones that look almost exactly the same as the ones that came before, but with new superpowers. It doesn’t matter; the outcome is the same level of bad.

Bacteria can also learn to share their abilities to not die. Example—the bacteria that cause penicillin-resistant gonorrhea (GB) have little things living on them called plasmids. Plasmids are pretty much free to do whatever they want, including moving out of one bacterium and into another. When they move, they can bring GB’s powers of resistance to other bacteria. If those bacteria were already resistant to one form of antibiotic, they’re now resistant to two (multi-drug-resistant).

This is kind of a big deal. A report by the World Health Organization in the year 2000 estimated about 14,000 people in the United States were infected and died from various diseases that were caused by drug-resistant microorganisms. These diseases are often picked up in hospitals while you’re being treated for other things. They’re called nosocomial infections.

So we try to come up with new and better antibiotics. The research and development for this takes about 15-20 years for each drug, and costs around $500 million. This is, perhaps, not the best solution for drug-resistant bugs.

What else can we do?

Well, to start, you can wash your hands and do a huge deal to prevent spreading infection in the first place. One of the most disgusting things on the planet is not washing your hands after using the bathroom, especially a public bathroom. Did you know that some people actually use public bathrooms and then turn the water on and splash it, to make others in the stalls think they’re washing their hands? At that point of time, why wouldn’t you just follow through? Gross. I look down on you if you don’t wash your hands after using the bathroom.

I’ve gone off the topic.

Other ways you can not cause drug-resistance in bacteria: