Bad news all day, every day.

Friends: We are losing the use of antibiotics, giant pieces of ice are breaking off Antarctica, our fancy modern products are poisoning us/giving us disease/reducing our IQ, and society is probably going to collapse.

Like I said, bad news all day, every day.

**********************

WHO warns against 'post-antibiotic' era

The 'post-antibiotic' era is near, according to a report released today by the World Health Organization (WHO). The decreasing effectiveness of antibiotics and other antimicrobial agents is a global problem, and a surveillance system should be established to monitor it, the group says.

There is nothing hopeful in WHO's report, which pulls together data from 129 member states to show extensive resistance to antimicrobial agents in every region of the world. Overuse of antibiotics in agriculture — to promote livestock growth — and in hospitals quickly leads to proliferation of drug-resistant bacteria, which then spread via human travel and poor sanitation practices.

"A post-antibiotic era — in which common infections and minor injuries can kill — far from being an apocalyptic fantasy, is instead a very real possibility for the twenty-first century," writes Keiji Fukuda, WHO assistant director-general for health security, in a foreword to the report.

Scientists Warn of Rising Oceans as Antarctic Ice Melts

The collapse of large parts of the ice sheet in West Antarctica appears to have begun and is almost certainly unstoppable, with global warming accelerating the pace of the disintegration, two groups of scientists reported Monday.

The finding, which had been feared by some scientists for decades, means that a rise in global sea level of at least 10 feet may now be inevitable. The rise may continue to be relatively slow for at least the next century or so, the scientists said, but sometime after that it will probably speed up so sharply as to become a crisis.

The Scary New Evidence on BPA-Free Plastics

Scientists have tied BPA to ailments including asthma, cancer, infertility, low sperm count, genital deformity, heart disease, liver problems, and ADHD. "Pick a disease, literally pick a disease," says Frederick vom Saal, a biology professor at the University of Missouri-Columbia who studies BPA.
...
Today many plastic products, from sippy cups and blenders to Tupperware containers, are marketed as BPA-free. But [recent] findings—some of which have been confirmed by other scientists—suggest that many of these alternatives share the qualities that make BPA so potentially harmful.
...
George Bittner...recently coauthored a paper in the NIH journal Environmental Health Perspectives. It reported that "almost all" commercially available plastics that were tested leached synthetic estrogens—even when they weren't exposed to conditions known to unlock potentially harmful chemicals, such as the heat of a microwave, the steam of a dishwasher, or the sun's ultraviolet rays. According to Bittner's research, some BPA-free products actually released synthetic estrogens that were more potent than BPA.

The Toxins That Threaten Our Brains

Last month, more research brought concerns about chemical exposure and brain health to a heightened pitch. Philippe Grandjean, Bellinger’s Harvard colleague, and Philip Landrigan, dean for global health at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in Manhattan, announced to some controversy in the pages of a prestigious medical journal that a “silent pandemic” of toxins has been damaging the brains of unborn children. The experts named 12 chemicals—substances found in both the environment and everyday items like furniture and clothing—that they believed to be causing not just lower IQs but ADHD and autism spectrum disorder. Pesticides were among the toxins they identified.
...
It's surprising to learn how little evidence there is for the safety of chemicals all around us, in our walls and furniture, in our water and air. Many consumers assume there is a rigorous testing process before a new chemical is allowed to be a part of a consumer product. Or at least some process.

"We still don’t have any kind of decent law on the books that requires that chemicals be tested for safety before they come to market"...

Can a collapse of global civilization be avoided?

Maybe, but "but the odds of avoiding collapse seem small."

We're all gonna die...of formerly curable diseases

It will come as no surprise, that I have been, and remain, pretty concerned about is antibiotic-resistant diseases. Fueling my fear, it seems almost every week I trip across yet another story describing a virulent strain of some disease that no longer responds to antibiotics, or that has shown a drastic uptick in the number of antibiotic-resistant cases. Being a person who loves to share what she has, even if it's bad news, I thought I'd share two stories I've come across lately. Here goes.

1. E. Coli That Cause Urinary Tract Infections are Now Resistant to Antibiotics

In examining more than 12 million urine analyses from [2000 to 2010], [a set of researchers at George Washington University] found that cases caused by E. coli resistant to ciprofloxacin grew five-fold, from 3% to 17.1% of cases. And E. coli resistant to the drug trimethoprim-sulfame-thoxazole jumped from 17.9% to 24.2%. These are two of the most commonly prescribed antibiotics used to treat UTIs. When they are not effective, doctors must turn to more toxic drugs, and the more those drugs are used, the less effective they in turn become. When those drugs stop working, doctors will be left with a drastically reduced toolkit with which to fight infection.

People suffered from UTIs long before antibiotics were discovered in the early twentieth century, of course. Should these drugs cease to be effective, we’ll have to go back to what we were doing before. The truth is, though, before antibiotics we had no real treatment. ...[At some points in time], as a last-ditch effort, [doctors] operated to drain puss from the infected kidneys and hoped the patient would survive.  (Source; all emphasis mine.)

Untreated UTIs can lead to kidney infections, kidney failure, and blood poisoning. As someone who had a kidney infection five or six years ago (though not one caused by a UTI), I can assure you that such infections are really no fun at all, as they involve sustained periods of intense fevers (upwards of 106 degrees), and  may require you to take yourself to the hospital emergency room, where you will need intravenous antibiotics, which will make you woozy, so they'll give you something else for that, and then because of the anti-wooze medicine, they won't let you drive your car home, so if you parked in the wrong parking structure you will end up having a parking ticket when you come back for your car the next day. Like I said: No fun at all. So it certainly doesn't warm my heart that UTIs are becoming meaner.

Here's the full article about the antibiotic-resistant UTI E. Coli on PubMed.

2. Tuberculoses (TB) has been making headlines for a while because of the virulent multi-drug-resistant strains that are going around. Not only does there exist a whole wikipedia article about "Multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis," but there's also one for "Extensively drug resistant tuberculosis" AND one for "Totally drug-resistant tuberculosis," which just proves how big a deal drug-resistant TB is becoming. When NPR did a whole thing about TB last month, I was convinced right-quick that I should run far, far away from anybody who might have TB. Or who has a cough. Or who has been near anyone with a cough. Because if you happen catch one of the nasty TB strains, your treatment will involve 28 MONTHS of pills and shots (13,664 pills, 244 shots), which come with side effects such as "permanent hearing loss, permanent dizziness, kidney damage, psychosis, liver failure, nausea, rashes"--one or more of which 33 percent of patients allegedly suffer. And after all that, only about 50 percent of people recover! And don't rest high and mighty thinking this is a disease that only people in other countries get. Just last month NPR reported on an outbreak of multiple-drug-resistant TB in Wisconsin. So there.

Want to know more? You probably don't. But just in case you do, the WHO is keeping a close eye on the everybody's-gonna-die-from-TB situation and has a ton of info about it. Based on very cursory perusal, I've learned that if you want to avoid people with TB, you'll probably want to avoid all the countries in darker greens on the map below, which have the most people with drug-resistant TB (in terms of absolute numbers):

Click to go to a map with interactivity!

And you'll REALLY want to avoid Khazakstan, Belarus, Moldova, and South Africa, which have the highest incidence of multiple-drug resistant TB.

The above travel tip will end Day 3 of my 30 days of content. I've got to be off to drink margaritas and eat tacos. Ole!

Not dead, just restin'

Hello, friends and strangers. It was recently brought to my attention that I haven't been doomsday prophesying very much at all this year. Rest assured I haven't stopped reading about horrible things; I've just stopped writing about them. Things are busy, you know. I got promoted at work, my car got covered in tar, and to get it off I had to coat the entire thing with peanut butter and then rinse it off (which took even longer than you might expect), I've joined a bunch of "sports" leagues, as well as a wine tasting club, and now I'm thinking about moving, or maybe even buying a place. But those are all excuses and distractions from the real meat of this post, which is supposed to be a bunch of links to articles that recently caught my attention.

As I'm sure the world is clamoring for more of my overreactions to things that I read, I won't make any further ado.

1. The bees are still dying in droves. It might be due to pesticides. You should worry because we need the bees to pollinate our food!

Annual bee losses of 5 percent to 10 percent once were the norm for beekeepers. But after colony collapse disorder surfaced around 2005, the losses approached one-third of all bees, despite beekeepers’ best efforts to ensure their health.Nor is the impact limited to beekeepers. The Agriculture Department says a quarter of the American diet, from apples to cherries to watermelons to onions, depends on pollination by honeybees. Fewer bees means smaller harvests and higher food prices.

Related: Beekeepers are suing the EPA over insecticides.

A year after groups formally petitioned the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), four beekeepers and five environmental and consumer groups filed a lawsuit in Federal District Court against the agency for its failure to protect pollinators from dangerous pesticides.  The coalition, represented by attorneys for the Center for Food Safety (CFS), seeks suspension of the registrations of insecticides that have repeatedly been identified as highly toxic to honey bees, clear causes of major bee kills and significant contributors to the devastating ongoing mortality of bees known as colony collapse disorder (CCD).  The suit challenges EPA’s ongoing handling of the pesticides as well as the agency’s practice of “conditional registration” and labeling deficiencies.

2. Speaking of modern farming ruining everything, toxic algae bloomed like crazy all over Lake Erie in 2011 because the lake was overloaded with phosphorous and other nutrients from fertilizer and other agricultural runoff. Apparently, we can expect similar events in the future if farming practices aren't changed.

In 2011, Lake Erie experienced the largest algae bloom in its recorded history. At its peak in October, the mat of green scum on the lake’s surface was nearly four inches thick and covered an area of almost 2,000 square miles. That’s three times larger than any other bloom in the lake, ever. Plus it was toxic. Now research shows that such an event may become increasingly common.

3. A vial containing a virus that can cause hemorrhagic fever has gone missing from a research facility in Galveston. Let me repeat that: a vial containing a virus that can cause hemorrhagic fever has gone missing from a research facility in Galveston. Oh hey, where'd I put that hemorrhagic fever? I hope it's not at the bottom of my purse with my car keys.

4. Oh man, did you know that Visine, if swallowed, acts as a neurotoxin?

Used as directed, [eyedrops] may indeed give you that clear-eyed look but that’s mostly due to the constriction of blood vessels in the eye. Internally they also induce vasoconstriction (as Toxnet calls it).  The resulting symptoms...include rapid heart beat, nausea, blurred vision, drowsiness, convulsions. The Toxnet entry, based partly on cases of children who  swallowed a bottle of eyedrops or nosedrops left carelessly on a table or counter,  notes that “drowsiness and mild coma” often alternate with periods of thrashing and hyperactivity.

Remind me to keep eyedrops out of the reach of anyone who might be mad at me.

5. "Just because shit is depressing or horrible, doesn’t mean you can’t laugh about it with blood in your mouth." Natalie Dee is awesome.

6. Cow pee spreads antibiotic resistance through the soil. Chew on that. Or don't.

7. Venice flooded like crazy late last year. Is this a portent for the world to come? Survey (of me only) says yes.

8. No more letting Timmy chew on the dirt! Seems like lead is getting into kids' blood, from the soil.

While homeowners have learned over the years how to better manage old, peeling lead paint, the lead that was in gasoline was deposited on the ground and is still scattered throughout soils in many postindustrial U.S. cities. Kids still play in that dirt, and little kids may even eat it on occasion.

In a February paper published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology, McElmurry and a team of economists and urban health specialists argue that the seasonal fluctuation of children's blood lead levels seen in industrial cities like Detroit indicate that kids are exposed to lead from contaminated soil that turns into airborne dust in the summertime.

Boston was mentioned in the article, so I'm especially alarmed at this one. I'm glad I don't have a kid...I'd be terrified about him or her breathing the air during summer!

----------

It's Friday, yay.

Oh Great, now my lightbulbs are giving me cancer and we are all going to get incurable gonorrhea

Sarcastic thanks, NPR, for putting me on high alert about two disparate but equally distressing issues (in the sense that--knock on wood--neither is likely to affect me much, but they could): UV exposure from compact flourescent light bulbs (CFLs), and antibiotic-resistant Gonorrhea.

Let's take each of these issues in turn.

1. CFLs = Cancer?

A study has just been published in the journal Photochemistry and Photobiology (scintillatingly entitled "The Effects of UV Emission from Compact Fluorescent Light Exposure on Human Dermal Fibroblasts and Keratinocytes In Vitro") that's been taken up by the popular press a bit, mostly because the science translates immediately and obviously into FEAR AND CONCERN (enter: me).  In the study, researchers from SUNY Stony Brook used in vitro skin cells and a variety of CFL bulbs they picked up at the store to demonstrate that many of the CFLs, despite claims of safety, emit the the type of UV light that can lead to skin cancer (or at least skin cell damage). I'll let the researchers themselves describe the study (or go read it yourself in the open-access (!) article):

In this study, we studied the effects of exposure to CFL illumination on healthy human skin tissue cells (fibroblasts and keratinocytes). Cells exposed to CFLs exhibited a decrease in the proliferation rate, a significant increase in the production of reactive oxygen species, and a decrease in their ability to contract collagen. Measurements of UV emissions from these bulbs found significant levels of UVC and UVA (mercury [Hg] emission lines), which appeared to originate from cracks in the phosphor coatings, present in all bulbs studied. The response of the cells to the CFLs was consistent with damage from UV radiation...No effect on cells...was observed when they were exposed to incandescent light of the same intensity. [From the abstract]

Despite claims (not having the UV emission), our measurements of emissions spectra from CFL bulbs, indicated significant levels of UVA and UVC. The amount of emissions varied randomly between different bulbs and different manufacturers. CFL bulbs work primarily through the excitation of Hg vapor that has fluorescence with the characteristic wavelength of 184 and 253 nm (UVC) and 365 nm (UVA;12). The enclosure of the bulbs is coated with different types of phosphors, which absorb the X-ray emissions and fluoresce within the visible range. CFLs consist of tightly coiled small diameter tubes; this introduces larger stresses in the fluorescent coating, and causes cracks or uncoated areas, whose location and number varied greatly. Closer examination of some of these commercially available bulbs showed multiple defects in their coating, thus allowing UV-light emission.

...Taken together, our results confirm that UV radiation emanating from CFL bulbs (randomly selected from different suppliers) as a result of defects or damage in the phosphorus coating is potentially harmful to human skin. [Both paragraphs above from the conclusion, bold emphasis added by me]

You can read more here, in an informative and slightly hilarious article (mostly for its final sentence) from some news outlet on Long Island. Or bask in the probably brain-cancer-causing glow of fox news (GOODBYE, EPIDERMIS!).

On the less dire side, I should probably mention that I heard on the radio that staying several feet away from open CFL bulbs and/or using lamp shades, can pretty much mitigate your UV exposure.

2. And now for something completely different. Gonorrhea...that you can't cure.

Your skin is not the only organ you should be worrying about. Just when I was looking for an excuse to use the following animated GIF, NPR gave me one in the form of this article about antibiotic resistant gonorrhea. Apparently, the CDC has recently issued new guidelines about the treatment of gonorrhea, to try to stall the (probably inevitable) resistance of the disease to all antibiotics we know about.

Yeah, that's right. We are well on our way to having a strain of gonorrhea going around that is resistant to all known antibiotics. They've already seen it in Japan, and in Europe to some extent, and things are not looking very good in the US at the moment. You may or may not know this, but back in the 1970's you could pop a little penicillin and get rid of your gonorrhea, no problem. That is far from true any more.

As NPR reports:

"Gonorrhea used to be susceptible to penicillin, ampicillin, tetracycline and doxycycline — very commonly used drugs," said Jonathan Zenilman, who studies infectious diseases at Johns Hopkins.

But one by one, each of those antibiotics — and almost every new one that has come along since — eventually stopped working. One reason is that the bacterium that causes gonorrhea can mutate quickly to defend itself, Zenilman said.

"If this was a person, this person would be incredibly creative," he said. "The bug has an incredible ability to adapt and just develop new mechanisms of resisting the impact of these drugs."

Another reason is that antibiotics are used way too frequently, giving gonorrhea and many other nasty germs too many chances to learn how to survive.

"A lot of this is occurring not because of treatment for gonorrhea but overuse for other infections, such as urinary tract infections, upper respiratory tract infections and so forth," Zenilman said.

It got to the point recently where doctors had only two antibiotics left that still worked well against gonorrhea — cefixime and ceftriaxone.

But on Thursday, federal health officials announced that one of their worst fears had come true: Evidence had emerged that gonorrhea had started to become resistant to cefixime in the United States.

"We're basically down to one drug, you know, as the most effective treatment for gonorrhea," Bolan said.

Cefixime and ceftriaxone are in the same class of antibiotics. That means it's only a matter of time before ceftriaxon goes, too, she says.

"The big worry is that we potentially could have untreatable gonorrhea in the United States," Bolan said.

That's already happened in other countries. Totally untreatable gonorrhea is popping up in Asia and Europe.

So the CDC declared that doctors should immediately stop using the cefixime.

"We feel we need to a take a critical step to preserve the last remaining drug we know is effective to treat gonorrhea," Bolan said.

About 700,000 Americans get gonorrhea every year. If untreated, gonorrhea can cause serious complications, including infertility and life-threatening ectopic pregnancies.

"I think it should be a real clarion call to every American that we've got a looming public health crisis on our hands and potentially hundreds of thousands of cases of untreatable gonorrhea in this country every year," said William Smith, who heads the National Coalition of STD Directors.

Let this be your PSA for the day: Try to avoid the clap if at all possible, or you may have it FOR LIFE.^*

Ladies aged 19 to 24, or anyone in the middle/southern middle of the country, I'm looking at you.^**

---

^{* I had to Google "nicknames for gonorrhea" to make sure the clap wasn't a nickname for some other STD, and stupidly, I did so on my work computer, so now I'm mildly worried I'm going to get a visit from HR or health services one of these days asking about my recent Googling activity.
**When "researching" antibiotic resistant gonorrhea for this blog post, I came upon the CDC's census of diseases in the US (aka "Summary of Notifiable Diseases") and I find myself morbidly fascinated. I may make a visualization of these data one day when I have some free time.***
*** I started this blog entry in the middle of last week and am only now finishing it. And there's very little writing in the damn thing--mostly cutting and pasting. How do i have so much less free time than I used to have? I'm going to need to quit my job to get back to blogging.}

The world, she is a dangerous place

If I were mother earth, I'd be pretty pissed off at humankind. And if I believed in a mother earth, I'd totally believe she's pretty pissed off. I mean, how else would you explain the glut of tornadoes in the south? That's clearly retribution for the fact that there's still a giant hole in the ozone layer (Side note: Is it shocking that until recently I did not realize that the ozone hole is still a problem?). Or, you know, the tornadoes might just be retribution for climate change in general. Or not. We don't know.

This is actually what I'm most concerned about in general: We don't know. All things considered, caveatting this statement with my rudimentary understanding of science and nature, we barely know anything about the ultimate consequences of what we're doing to the world. Even scarier, if my friends are at all representative of most people, we don't much care to know. I can't tell you the number of times I've tried to tell someone something about disease or climate change or death or disaster (I'm a great person to invite to parties, by the way) only to hear, 'I don't want to know! Stop talking!' People: Ignorance may be bliss, but complacency kills. Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence! (Side note: I'm getting a lot of new catch phrases from the reading I've been doing for this blog. I like it. Almost time to make a cartoon about me! ...Or unfriend me, as the case may be.)

Related: Want to know where (in America) you are most likely to die from weather-related incidents? There's a map for that! (Ha, good pun, self.)

****

In non-weather related news, I learned yesterday about some new ways to contract illness and/or get paralyzed:

1. Touching armadillos = leprosy.

Yep, according to a study that I read about on the NPR website, touching raw armadillo meat can give you leprosy. Finally, vindication for my fear of touching raw meat! Not that I've ever touched raw armadillo. But that would fall under my "ew" category just as much as chicken and beef. (Funniest part of the NPR article: right after warning you to avoid touching armadillo, they link to an armadillo chili recipe on some website...called yumyum.com.)

Related: Want to know where the most cases of leprosy occur in the US? There's a map for that too! (Less funny pun the second time, but still a true statement.)

2. Trying surfing for the first time = paralyzed.

While idly surfing the net last night, I came across a website I probably shouldn't know about called OMG Facts. One of the facts that I read actually did make me go OMG, so I shall share it with you: There's a documented medical condition called surfer's myelopathy, in which, when you try surfing for the first time, you could end up paralyzed. (To be fair, the condition can actually be caused by any activity in which you hyper-extend your back, but is most often (or most sensationally?) caused by surfing for the first time. I know! OMG, right??)

I don't want to sound alarmist (ha! of course I do!), but my discovery of this disorder means I am likely never to go in the ocean again. Not that I often go in it at the moment--I am already scared of the ocean, what with jellyfish and sharks and weird fish and all. AND, believe it or not, I have already been kind of worried about ocean-related paralysis, thanks to the "community water safety" segment I had to take in my 12th grade gym class (taught by Ms. Miller, she of the four-inch-long bedazzled fingernails). I vividly remember sitting in the humid pool room, on the bleachers, watching a video in which a man describes (and an actor reenacts) running into the ocean, encountering a wave, and ending up paralyzed (here's a similar story). The lesson I learned from this video was not to be careful, but rather to avoid the ocean at all costs. At that point in my life I had only ever been swimming in the ocean once (actually, the gulf of Mexico), and I found it to be an extremely unpleasant, salty experience. So avoiding the ocean, which I've done fairly successfully since 12th grade (three Hawaii trips excluded), really isn't too difficult for me. I might live in Los Angeles, but I think I've gone within an eighth of a mile of the ocean maybe ten times in the five years I've been here. Do I want to go to the beach? You mean, do I want to sit out on a swath of sand with hoards of people, roasting in the cancerous sun, sand getting in everything, wind whipping the pages around on the book I'm trying to read, with the risk of paralysis (or shark bite) if I try to get in the water? I'll pass, thanks.

With that happy thought, I wish you a tornado-, paralysis- and armadillo-free weekend! XOXO.

Did you know armadillos can swim? Me neither!

I might need to change my middle name to "Prescient"

I wasn't even looking for blog fodder today, but while reading a book review on the NPR website a link on the side of the page caught my eye. Just look what NPR is reporting today:

1 in 4 Supermarket Meat Samples Tainted with Drug-Resistant Bacteria

I kid you not.  To quote a Google Chat buddy and work colleague, "your blog is coming true sooner than we all thought." Indeed. Readers, I won't protest if you start calling me prescient.

According to a new study by the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen), the meat you buy at the supermarket has a significant chance of being contaminated by bacteria, and a slightly lower but not insignificant chance of being contaminated by multiple drug-resistant bacteria.

How did the researchers discover this? Simple. They went out, bought some meat, and tested it, as this press report describes. Specifically, researchers at TGen collected 136 samples of beef, chicken, poultry and turkey (covering 80 brands) from 26 retail grocery stores in Los Angeles, Chicago, Fort Lauderdale, Flagstaff, and Washington, DC. (Side note: how did they pick these five cities? They seem kind of random...maybe they had friends there?) (Second side note: in case you were wondering about what specific cuts of meat, the (open access!) article published on this study in Clinical Infections Diseases specifies that the beef was ground, the chicken in the form of breasts and thighs, the pork both in chops and ground form, and the turkey ground and in cutlets).

Anywho, they bought this meat and then they did some fancy scientist stuff and looked for bacteria (specifically staphylococcus aureus).  And oh, did they find it!  (Third side note: I do NOT recommend Google-imaging "staphylococcus aureus." Cannot. Unsee.) (Fourth side note: Staph infections kill more people than AIDS in the US). (Fifth and final side note: the large portion of killer staph infections are picked up in hospitals, not from meat.)

Back to the point. As NPR reports, of the samples tested "47 percent had evidence of Staphylococcus aureus (S. aureus) contamination. More than half of the bacteria they found were resistant to at least three classes of antibiotics."

I actually read through the four-page source study in Clinical Infections Diseases and it gives the breakdown of S. aureus contamination by meat type. First comes turkey (77% of samples were contaminated), followed by pork (42%), chicken (41%), and beef (37%). NINETY-SIX PERCENT of the S. aureus bits discovered were "resistant to at least 1 antimicrobial," including most commonly tetracycline, ampicillin, penicillin, and erythromycin, but also quinupristin/dalfopristin, fluoroquinolones, oxacillin, daptomycin, and vancomycin.

Multi-drug resistant strains of S. aureus--defined as "intermediate or complete resistance to 3 or more antimicrobial classes"--were "common," and was most prevalent among turkey, followed by pork, beef, and chicken.  In total, 52% of the S. aureus isolates they found were multi-drug resistant.

Because there were distinct strands of the bacteria on each different kind of meat, it suggests that food animals are the predominant source of contamination, not human handling after the fact. This is not particularly surprising. To quote the authors of the study, "Conventional concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) provide all the necessary components for the emergence and proliferation of multidrug-resistant zoonotic pathogens."

Now, before you panic and stop eating meat, the authors concede that "the public health relevance" of their study is "unclear," and as NPR notes, "most Staph found in meat can be eliminated by cooking food thoroughly." Nevertheless, "it can still pose a risk to consumers if handled unsafely or if it cross-contaminates with other things in the kitchen." And we in America should all be a at least a little bit worried, because we eat a ton of meat. And our meat eats a ton of antibiotics, as this chart demonstrates (chart taken from here, data from the FDA):

More thoughts about the way we make meat, a topic I am sure I will come back to, can be found here and here. More about antibiotic resistance here.

Until the next dispatch, be sure to cook your meat just a little more than you think is necessary.

Let's talk about antimicrobial resistance, baby, let's talk about you and me...let's talk about all the good things and the bad things that may be. But mostly the bad things.

Remember when people used to die left and right from curable diseases, simply because we hadn't discovered antibiotics yet?

Of course you don't...that was way back in the middle ages (or thereabouts--I was never much good at history). You know, back when people believed diseases were caused by an imbalance of humours in the body, and/or god sending punishment. Plus nobody really knew that lack of proper sanitation could cause death.  So I guess there were other mitigating factors in the high death rate from theoretically curable diseases...but still, lack of antibiotics and other drugs didn't help the matter.

We in the developed world with our fancy medicine and cleanly hospitals like to feel smug because we no longer die from the same horrible diseases as they did in the middle ages, but we aren't actually as protected as we think.  I'm sure you have all heard about the controversy about feeding antibiotics to animals, the overperscritpion of antibiotics, and the rise of antibiotic resistant bacteria? Well, that's today's fear-inspiring topic for "We're all gonna die."

Recently, a super-antibiotic-resistant bacteria was found in the water supply in New Delhi. This bacteria is called NDM-1, and not only was it found in the water people drink, not only does it have its own website, but it also has the potential to give its antibiotic resistance to other bacteria! As a reporter for the Guardian writes:

The bacterium was found to be indifferent to even our most powerful antibiotics. To make matters worse, the genes that gave it this superpower were found on a small ring of DNA that is easily traded between different species of bacteria.

New Delhi metallo-beta-lactamase (NDM-1) has since turned up in more than 16 countries across the world, including Britain. A study published in Lancet Infectious Diseases today shows the resistance factor has spread to 14 different species of bacteria, including pathogenic varieties responsible for dysentery and cholera. Most bacteria holding the NDM-1 plasmid are resistant to all but a couple of our most clumsy, brutal antibiotics. One strain is immune to all of them.

This news is quite alarming, and it (along with other similar concerns) has spurred worldwide alarms from the medical community. The World Health Organization made antimicrobial resistance the theme of World Health Day 2011, under the slogan (and I am not making this up, though I am bolding and italicizing it):

Antimicrobial resistance: no action today, no cure tomorrow.

A representative of the WHO posted a Q&A about the topic, and in response to the question "Is this the doomsday scenario of a world without antibiotics?" he answered:

Unfortunately yes, with these new multiresistant NDM1-containing strains and their potential for worldwide spread. Doctors will face a terrible dilemma when a pregnant woman develops a kidney infection that spills over into the bloodstream with a pan-resistant strain containing NDM1 and there are no treatment options. We are essentially back to an era with no antibiotics.

I don't think it's hasty if I say it is TIME TO PANIC!!

Diseases associated with antimicrobial resistance include but are certainly not limited to things like Staph (MRSA), Anthrax(!), Gonorrhea, and of course, Tuberculosis. (Side note: If you're interested in multi-drug resistant TB (and who wouldn't be), this is a really good book.)

A WHO pamphlet released in conjunction with World Health Day 2011 has some fun facts about antimicrobial resistance (AMR):

• About 440,000 new cases of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) emerge annually, causing at least 150,000 deaths. Extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB) has been reported in 64 countries to date.
• Resistance to earlier generation antimalarial medicines such as chloroquine and sulfadoxine-pyrimethamine is widespread in most malaria-endemic countries. Falciparum malaria parasites resistant to artemisinins are emerging in South-East Asia; infections show delayed clearance after the start of treatment (indicating resistance).
• A high percentage of hospital-acquired infections are caused by highly resistant bacteria such as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and vancomycin-resistant enterococci.
• Resistance is an emerging concern for treatment of HIV infection, following the rapid expansion in access to antiretroviral medicines in recent years; national surveys are underway to detect and monitor resistance.
• Ciprofloxacin is the only antibiotic currently recommended by WHO for the management of bloody diarrhoea due to Shigella organisms, now that widespread resistance has developed to other previously effective antibiotics. But rapidly increasing prevalence of resistance to ciprofloxacin is reducing the options for safe and efficacious treatment of shigellosis, particularly for children. New antibiotics suitable for oral use are badly needed.
• AMR has become a serious problem for treatment of gonorrhoea (caused by Neisseria gonorrhoeae), involving even “last-line” oral cephalosporins, and is increasing in prevalence worldwide. Untreatable gonococcal infections would result in increased rates of illness and death, thus reversing the gains made in the control of this sexually transmitted infection.
• New resistance mechanisms, such as the beta-lactamase NDM-1, have emerged among several gram-negative bacilli. This can render powerful antibiotics, which are often the last defence against multi-resistant strains of bacteria, ineffective.

Just in case you didn't read through all of that dense text, the fun facts indicate that we may no longer be able to cure malaria, staphylococcus infections, bloody diarrhea, gonorrhea, and NDM-1 infections.

As the WHO notes, complacency kills.  I think I'll leave you with that.