[HN Gopher] 4th person in US mysteriously stricken with deadly b...
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4th person in US mysteriously stricken with deadly bacteria from
South Asia
Author : _Microft
Score : 104 points
Date : 2021-08-10 15:09 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| As long we have a global economy where goods and consumption move
| faster than the signals (?) they give off, we're going to be
| subject to "invasive species" such as this. Add in antibiotic
| resistance and another collision of natural forces is in the
| making.
| tg180 wrote:
| Widespread antibiotic resistance would be a serious turning
| point for the global economy and the current way of life
| avgDev wrote:
| It doesn't help that MANY doctors are complete morons and
| give out antibiotics for "suspected" infection.
|
| The amount of times I had to refuse an antibiotic has been
| insane. There was a time I had some abdominal pain, got
| diagnosed with inflammation of the colon.....googled the name
| doctor said(cant recall now) but the information I found was
| that antibiotics are completely useless for it. In the end it
| was a muscle strain lol.
|
| FDA/CDC needs to step in and really crack down on antibiotic
| usage. If I could report the doctors I would. Documents
| should be reviewed and warnings issued.
| Zelphyr wrote:
| Conversely: my wife is a Nurse Practitioner and, when she
| was practicing family medicine, the number of times she had
| to refuse people antibiotics for what was obviously not
| bacterial (muscle strain, viral infection, etc...) was
| insane. She complained about it regularly.
|
| I agree that the FDA and CDC need to crack down on
| antibiotic usage. They should also provide better education
| as to when antibiotics are appropriate.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| If you can legally write a script and don't know that
| antibiotics aren't for virus you shouldn't be allowed to
| write scripts.
|
| We don't need a crackdown. We need medical professionals
| to put their education to use.
| Zelphyr wrote:
| I don't think it is a matter of the provider not knowing
| that antibiotics aren't for viral infections. They have
| patient after patient after patient coming in _demanding_
| to get an antibiotic. At some point, many of those
| providers give up and give in. I 'm proud of my wife for
| not being one of them.
| Angostura wrote:
| Key point from the article- it doesn't generally spread from
| person to person
| lambdaphagy wrote:
| Where have you heard that before?
| GavinMcG wrote:
| Do you actually have reason to doubt it here? Because cynical
| skepticism isn't a helpful alternative to genuinely doing our
| best to understand and correcting course when better data is
| available.
| FabHK wrote:
| Also, just to flog that old dead horse for the umpteenth
| time: Nobody said that "COVID-19 does not spread from
| person to person". What the WHO reported, on January 14
| 2020, at the very beginning of the pandemic when very
| little was known, was that "Preliminary investigations
| conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear
| evidence of human-to-human transmission".
|
| If you read that tweet and conclude that the WHO says that
| there is no human-to-human transmission, then you have a
| problem with reading comprehension.
| lambdaphagy wrote:
| WHO was largely denying the possibility of airborne
| transmission as late as July 2020.
|
| https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/71/9/2311/5867798
| lambdaphagy wrote:
| It's simply a matter of applying a prior: when I hear an
| organization's claim, I consider the base rate at which
| past claims have proven trustworthy, adjusting for whether
| past errors were honest mistakes, noble lies, culpable
| failures to apply medieval-peasant-tier common sense, the
| fruit of transparently ulterior motives, and so on. I sure
| hope they're right in this case but it's not clear why in
| particular I should think so.
|
| What do you do?
| GavinMcG wrote:
| I consider _all_ my priors, not just a single one about
| the source.
| adolph wrote:
| _B. pseudomallei is not considered to be transmitted via air or
| respiratory droplets in non-laboratory settings. Person-to-
| person transmission risk is considered extremely low as there
| have only been a few documented cases of person-to-person
| transmission; contact of damaged skin with polluted soil or
| water is the most frequent route for natural infection.
| Healthcare personnel are generally not at risk if they follow
| standard precautions. However, laboratory personnel are at
| increased risk because some lab procedures may aerosolize
| particles and release B. pseudomallei into the air. Laboratory
| personnel can reduce their risk of exposure by following good
| laboratory practices.3 Laboratory staff who may have been
| exposed to B. pseudomallei should refer to existing CDC
| guidance._
|
| https://emergency.cdc.gov/han/2021/han00448.asp
| launchaway wrote:
| https://twitter.com/mims/statuses/1217043229427761152?ref_sr.
| ..
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| This isn't the Chinese authorities reporting on this
| bacteria though.
| tenfourwookie wrote:
| Also key: All four are known to have had contact. It's not
| random.
| FabHK wrote:
| Sure? The article says that the cases are "connected", but
| not that the individuals have been in contact. (It could have
| been that they happened to use the same contaminated
| product.)
|
| > CDC investigators determined that all four cases are
| connected and they suspect a so-far-unknown imported product
| may be to blame.
| tenfourwookie wrote:
| reading comprehension : 1 tenfourwookie : 0
| tenfourwookie wrote:
| I'm wrong. It does not say this.
| racialfur wrote:
| Now ars should call covid as virus from china.
| autoexec wrote:
| > Symptoms can span localized pain or swelling, fever,
| ulceration, abscess, cough, chest pain, high fever, headache,
| anorexia, respiratory distress, abdominal discomfort, joint pain,
| disorientation, weight loss, stomach or chest pain, muscle or
| joint pain, and seizures, the CDC notes.
|
| This is the first time I've heard of a bacteria causing anorexia
| or for that matter the first time I've seen anything (apart from
| possibly genetics) being a direct cause of anorexia
| etrevino wrote:
| So in this sense they mean a lack of appetite, essentially. As
| I understand it, what most people think of as anorexia
| (purposely starving yourself) would be referred to anorexia
| nervosa.
| ljf wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anorexia_(symptom)
|
| Quote: Anorexia is a symptom, not a diagnosis. When a
| healthcare provider states that a patient has anorexia, they
| are simply referring to a decreased appetite. This means that
| the provider must find and treat the underlying cause of the
| anorexia. Anorexia is not to be confused with the mental health
| disorder anorexia nervosa. Because the terms are often used
| interchangeably, a provider must clarify to a patient to which
| they are referring as to avoid confusion. Anyone can manifest
| with anorexia regardless of their gender, age, or weight.
| NoImmatureAdHom wrote:
| It'd be great to see more investment in antibiotics, and we need
| world governments to lead the charge. It'd be even better to see
| our current drug prohibition regime pivot from recreational drugs
| to antibiotics. Development of new, fantastic antibiotics is only
| a matter of time and money. We as a species have the
| capabilities, we just need to make the move.
|
| Investment is a problem because ABX aren't profitable relative to
| other opportunities (in biotech / pharma, think cancer or Hep C).
| ABX cure, rather than treat, which means you have a single
| revenue event rather than recurring (chronic) revenues. Even in
| that space, Hep C was way more profitable. And if you're
| successful with ABX in a public health sense, the number of new
| cases generally goes _down_. Compare to a cancer drug, or a
| urinary incontinence drug, where that doesn 't happen. There have
| been precious few new ABX developed in recent years. One is
| daptomycin ("Cubicin" in American marketing-speak). It was a few
| tens of thousands per course of treatment when it came out,
| pitched (and approved) as a narrow treatment for a very few
| indications, because that's how you have to sneak a new
| antibiotic through the system these days--you won't command high
| enough prices otherwise. It is, in fact, a broad-spectrum drug
| and I'm sure it's used off-label.
|
| I think what we need to do to fix this is recognize it is a
| public health problem that the market is not forward-looking
| enough to fix, and use government power to fix it. We could do
| this by subsidizing the cost of pushing a new molecule through
| the FDA. Or we could, you know, fix the FDA and make their review
| processes more utilitarian and less costly...but that's bigger
| fish. There are limited government programs trying to do this at
| the moment.
|
| A lot of the reason we see new, ABX-resistant strains in SE Asia
| is unrestrained use of our better drugs, which are cheap in
| generic form (ciprofloxacin, for example). We should be
| regulating ABX use with the fervor we now reserve for so many
| low-harm recreational substances. Perhaps we could just pivot
| that whole industry rather than taking them apart...
| bigbillheck wrote:
| It's the meat industry that's by far the worst offender in
| antibiotics, and they've got too much money to do anything
| about without an awful lot of screaming.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Research more antibiotics? Let's understand what the current
| ones do before we introduce new ones.
| pixxel wrote:
| > South Asia is the southern region of Asia, which is defined in
| both geographical and ethno-cultural terms. The region consists
| of the countries of Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India,
| Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and the Maldives.
|
| ~Wikipedia
| nopcode wrote:
| Shouldn't we call it a "Delta Bacteria" before it turns racial?
| Zelphyr wrote:
| While scary, is this really newsworthy? We're surrounded by
| bacteria that can be dangerous, but usually isn't.
|
| Five years ago, my dad was admitted to the hospital because he
| contracted cryptococcus neoformans[1]. The thing is, that
| bacteria is everywhere. It's just that most people's bodies are
| able to easily fight it off. Most of the time, when someone
| becomes infected it is due to low immunity (HIV/AIDS patients and
| transplant patients, for example) He is neither of them. It turns
| out, there is a tiny percentage of the population that becomes
| infected and nobody knows why.
|
| It was scary. Until they finally did a biopsy of his brain they
| were convinced he had cancer, they just didn't know what form.
| After the biopsy they were able to easily treat it with a common,
| over the counter medication they give women for yeast infections.
|
| The bacteria had done enough damage that they had to install a
| permanent ventricular shunt (basically, a subdural tube that goes
| from his brain to his stomach to act as an overflow for cerebral
| fluid his body can no longer properly process in the brain)
| People die from cryptococcal meningitis like he had. My dad's
| neurosurgeon even told me that my dad was days away from death,
| had they not figured out what the problem was when they did.
|
| Still, no news outlets reported on it. So I can't help but
| wonder, again, the newsworthiness of this mysterious deadly
| bacteria other than Ars Technica is joining all other media
| companies in trying to drum up revenue by needlessly scaring
| people.
|
| 1: https://www.cdc.gov/fungal/cdc-and-fungal/cryptococcal-
| menin...
| bsder wrote:
| > While scary, is this really newsworthy?
|
| It is because the strains were genetically linked yet cover a
| vast disconnected geographic area.
|
| Something is bringing the bacteria in, and they're trying to
| find it.
|
| In addition, when something like this appears you want medical
| workers to be thinking about it as an option and adjust their
| Bayesian probabilities.
|
| The standard "When you hear hoofbeats, think horses not zebras"
| is fine unless the circus just came to town. At which point,
| horses is still more likely, but zebras are no longer out of
| the question.
| noodlenotes wrote:
| > "Currently, CDC believes the most likely cause is an imported
| product (such as a food or drink, personal care or cleaning
| products or medicine) or an ingredient in one of those types of
| products," the agency said in a statement.
|
| In case anyone was curious and didn't want to read the article.
| Avenger42 wrote:
| Also, though:
|
| > So far, the CDC has collected and tested more than 100
| samples of products, soil, and water from the four patients'
| homes, but none has turned up positive for B. pseudomallei. The
| agency noted that tracking down a source of B. pseudomallei can
| sometimes be difficult as the bacteria can take two to three
| weeks to develop into an infection, broadening the window of
| possible exposure times and testing patients' memories.
| grafelic wrote:
| https://www.ajtmh.org/view/journals/tpmd/71/3/article-p360.x...
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(page generated 2021-08-10 23:03 UTC)