Super Bugs

I have an idea. Let's change the subject.

Here's another example of the backwards nature of news reporting. I could go off about the Downing Street Memo and Minutes, but that's another post entirely. This is a seemingly small thing.

USA Today, Tuesday, June 7, 2005. Front page of the "Life" section covers Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes relationship; "Star Wars: Episode III" reaching $300 million in 17 days; who will star in the remake of "The Poseidon Adventure;" King Tut's new museum tour; and the "reimagining" of Warner Brothers classic cartoon characters into dark superheroes. Eight pages later, at the bottom of the sidebar for "Health, Education & Science," is the following piece, taking up less than 2 inches of space:

'Superbugs' survive on sheets, study finds
Mutated, drug-resistant "superbugs" that cause an increasing number of hospital infections and deaths can live for weeks on bed linens, computer keyboard covers and under acrylic fingernails, a study finds. The results support other research that shows super-strict hygiene is needed in hospitals to battle the bacteria, some of which are nearly impossible to kill even with the strongest antibiotics, scientists told a meeting in Atlanta of the American Society for Microbiology.

You've seen the Lysol commercials where the mother isn't satisfied until she sprays the shit out of the trash can, and obliterates the bacteria off of every surface in the house. Most people feel safe seeing these images. But I have the exact opposite reaction, because of one lecture I heard in Junior College.

My teacher's name was Bill Holston, and he was probably one of the best teachers I ever had. He could make any subject interesting, no matter how dry, and his History and Anthropology classes were always full. Mr. Holston was one of those people who imbued learning with a sense that it was a magnificent adventure. His historical lectures were alive with the stories of real people, and rich with detail (colors, sounds, even smells!).

Anyway, during one Anthropology class (I believe it was a lecture regarding Darwin and the conflict between teaching evolution and "intelligent design"), he gave us a simple illustration to show us evolution in action.

Here it is:

Take a petri dish with some bacteria in it. It doesn't even have to be the bad kind. Spray a liberal amount of Lysol into it. What's going to happen is you're going to kill nearly all of the bacteria (maybe 99.9% of it). But you're not going to kill all of it. Some of them are going to live, possibly because they have some small mutation that makes them slightly more resistant. Those bacteria are going to create more of themselves, and likely pass on that resistance to the new bacteria.

You can keep spraying them as much as you want, and use stronger and stronger antibacterial substances, but there will always be a few that survive. The more you try to kill them, the stronger are the ones that remain. Eventually what you are doing is creating superbacteria that you aren't able to kill.

This is why I've always felt that our obession with sterilization is a delusion, and is creating a bigger problem. There are now hundreds of "antibacterial" products, and it's possible that we are turning hospital environments into one of the most dangerous places to be if you are sick.

I heard somewhere that you never get the same cold twice. Your body fights off the virus and "remembers" how to resist it, so when you get sick again, it's a mutated or different virus your body is fighting. If you are killing off all the normal kinds of bacteria our bodies are used to protecting us from, and replacing them with more virulent mutations, are our defensive systems capable of adapting quickly enough to fight them? Are we not in fact weakening our own species and making theirs stronger?

Is that issue so less important than whether Tom Cruise is going to marry his girlfriend?

Here's the link to the original story, put out by the group mentioned above:

Superbugs resist "last resort" antibiotics