Wash Away Dangerous Germs

Nurses wearing gloves sprinkled them with glow-in-the-dark powder and went about their work. In the dark, they could see the powder ended up everywhere, including on their faces, the same way germs spread.

     As the number of world travelers increases, so does the opportunity for diseases to travel from people and hospitals in one country to another. Superbugs with super names, like methlcillin-resistant Straphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE), are most dangerous. They resist the antibiotics that usually can cure bacterial infections in wounds, blood, and the gut, for example.

     Using antibiotics to cure a virus, such as coronavirus, known as COVID-19, is actually harmful. Not only are they ineffective against viruses, but they also help build up resistance to the best drugs for fighting bacterial infections.

     Viruses are extremely tiny. They consist of a packet of DNA or RNA messengers within a protein and fatty-like envelope that does not dissolve in water. Some viruses, such as COVID-19, include spikes able to fasten themselves to living human, animal, and plant cells. Although viruses cannot exist outside a living host cell, once their chemical compounds penetrate and infect a cell, they compromise the cell's immune system. Unless an antiviral drug stops them, virus-infected cells can each reproduce a million copies ready to infect more hosts.
 
     It is all too easy for children (and adults) to transfer germs that can remain harmless on skin and around nostrils into their noses and mouths where they cause disease. Prevention can be relatively easy, if hand sanitizers are accessible in handy locations. Children who are around animals especially need to wash their hands, and even doctors need to be reminded of the need to wash their hands between routine patient contacts.

     Earlier posts stress the importance of reducing resistance to antibiotics by using these drugs sparingly. See "Global Search for New Antibiotics" and "Diseases and Cures Travel the Globe."

Lyme Aid

Summertime and the living is not easy where Lyme disease is on the rise. Black-legged ticks that carry the disease are now in 30 countries and half of all U.S. counties, mainly from the Northeast to the Midwest. Some blame the increase on warming from climate change.

     You might see a bull's-eye rash swelling around the bacteria left by a tick bite, but symptoms listed at LymeDisease.org vary and complicate diagnosis. Patients may have severe migraines, muscle spasms, and even seem to have ALS. Blood tests are worthless. The bacteria head for body tissues where they can spread to muscles, nerves, the brain, and heart before the needed early treatment with antibiotics is begun. New antibody tests are being developed.

     Since ticks pick up Lyme disease by feeding on white-footed mice, there are efforts to combat the disease by developing ways to kill ticks in the yards and nesting materials mice inhabit and to prevent mice from carrying the disease. Gene editing might be able to make mice less tasty to ticks or to immunize mice from tick-carrying bacteria.

     In summer, it's far more fun to catch and release fireflies than to be caught by ticks...mosquitoes and wasps.

Global Search for New Antibiotics

Throughout the world, as many as 700,000 people die from drug-resistant infections each year. Since so-called superbugs have become resistant to the antibiotics that have cured cholera, pneumonia, tuberculosis, and other infections from bacteria since the 1940s, there is a two-pronged approach: 1) to reduce the overuse of antibiotics which reduce their effectiveness and 2) to find new antibiotics.

     Antibiotics can be overused unless hospitals monitor the incidence of antibiotic-resistant cases, pharmacists supervise use of antibiotics, and patients are not tested to see if their infections are bacterial or viral. On viruses, antibiotics are useless. Even when infections are caused by bacteria, conventional oral antibiotics, such as penicillin, need to be tried first to cure staph skin infections, C diff bacteria infections in the gut, bronchial infections, and urinary tract infections. Other treatments, such as more expensive daily shots and IV hookups in the hospital, need to be used sparingly and held back as a last line of defense.

     Since overuse of antibiotics contributes to their resistance, the antibiotics farmers use add to this overuse by humans through the food they eat. Because farmers have been using antibiotics as a way to stimulate faster growth of livestock and to prevent disease on factory farms where overcrowding spreads illnesses, under the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act, proposed federal legislation would regulate antibiotic use on factory farms. A dozen or so manufacturers that produce antibiotics for livestock already have voluntarily agreed to change the directions on their labels to stipulate use for medicinal purposes not artificial growth.

      Once new FDA guidelines are implemented by January, 2017, a licensed veterinarian will have to supervise the use of antibiotics in livestock feed and water to treat and prevent disease and to promote growth. Since treatment of some diseases in cattle and dairy cows now requires low-level feeding of antibiotics, farmers and veterinarians are working to keep animals healthy with improved sanitation and nutrition as well as new vaccines. Pear and apple growers who spray trees to prevent bacterial blight infections also are looking for alternatives to the antibiotics now in use.

     Agricultural use of antibiotics, estimated to be 70% of all antibiotic use, has begun to cost farmers money. Denmark's ban on growth promoting animal antibiotics prevents beef imports from countries still using them. Since consumers are demanding meat and poultry free of routine antibiotic use, suppliers, such as Perdue, have stopped their use. While McDonald's plans to serve only antibiotic-free chicken in the US by the summer of 2017, consumers in other countries will not have this guarantee. Nowhere are McDonald's consumers guaranteed antibiotic free beef or pork.

     Since patients take antibiotics only for a short time, pharmaceutical companies have a greater incentive to develop other drugs rather than new antibiotics to replace the older ones that have lost their effectiveness. To stimulate research for new antibiotics, the National Institutes of Health's Center of Excellence for Translational Research (CETR) has put a $16 million grant behind the effort. When soil studies no longer uncovered new antibiotic microbes, researchers found new sources among ants, plants, and sponges in Florida, Brazil, Puerto Rico, and Hawaii. For example, the microbes in the milky white bacteria that cover some ants produce antibiotic compounds that fight different causes of infection. In the lab, scientists look for compounds with chemical structures that are different from known ones. Genomic sequencing of bacteria also helps determine whether they contain antibiotic-producing microbes. Using CETR grant money, a team of investigators headed by Dr. David Andes, chief of the division of infectious diseases at the University of Wisconsin Hospital, and Cameron Currie, a University of Wisconsin bacteriology professor, have found 15 potential new antibiotics.

     On a side note, the following are three games that teach how viruses spread:
Pandemic is a tabletop game for four players who experience success and failure as they work together to stop the spread of diseases.
Plague, Inc. is an app game where players can see graphs of how lethal contagions are considering health care systems in various countries and global travel.
Pox: Save the People is a board game that uses blue vaccinated and red infected chips.

(This post amplifies information in the earlier post, "Infection-Killing Bugs and Antibiotics.")

 

Infection-Killing Bugs and Antibiotics

Children who like to look under rocks for bugs (See the earlier blog post, "The Bees and the Birds.") have company in the scientific community that is searching for microbes to cure drug-resistant infections from bacteria and fungi in patients all over the world.

     According to an article by David Wahlberg in the Wisconsin State Journal (April 14, 2014), soil-based microbes produced miracle antibiotics after World War II. In Alexander McCall Smith's book, The Minor Adjustment Beauty Salon, for example, a character in Botswana, Africa, attributes cures to the kgaba plant. But recent soil-based research keeps rediscovering the same antibiotics.

     Consequently, kids can get in on the search for ants, beetles, bees, wasps, termites, sponges, and sea squirts that have found new microbes in bacteria that could act as antibiotics in humans.

     At the moment, the U.S. National Institutes of Health is funding a $16 million, five-year study to discover bugs, marine life, and other species that could help produce the drugs needed to treat staph and other infections. (An earlier blog post, "Medical Profession Suffers from International Conflict," tells how blue light phototherapy is being used to treat staph infections.) In January, 2015, the teixobactin antibiotic which has been shown to foil infection resistance passed animal tests without side effects.

     Young people interested in helping collect specimens or in doing a project involving the development of antibiotics from new microbes might get in touch with:
     Dr. David Andes, Chief of Infectious Diseases at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health in Madison, Wisconsin
     Cameron Currie, a bacteriology professor at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, Wisconsin, who is doing research in Florida, Wisconsin, and possibly in Hawaii
     Tim Bugin, assistant professor of pharmaceutical sciences at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, Wisconsin, who is doing research in Puerto Rica and the Florida Keys.

     Also see the later posts, "Global Search for New Antibiotics" and "Bacteria Talk to Each Other."