New superbug really loves alcoholics
These superbugs are booze hounds!
How many times has someone on a TV show or in a movie cleaned a bloody wound with a handy bottle of liquor? A few. But what if doing that ended up making the person — and maybe even the improvising doctor — very, very sick?
Get ready for life with a superbug that is so badass that it doesn’t flee from the cleansing power of alcohol. No, Acinetobacter baumanni drinks it up like a Republican fundraiser in a bondage club.
A. baumanni used to be a fairly ordinary bacteria kept in check by antibiotics. But like other once-cowed pathogens, A. baumanni has grown resistant to antibiotics. (Check out the chart at the bottom to see where it attacks you.)
She might be a celebrity to us, but to A. baumanni, Lindsay looks like spring break.
And if researchers detect a particularly slurred and nasty attitude from this bug it might be because A. baumanni gets more virulent in the presence of ethanol according to the journal PLoS Pathogens. As we all know, ethanol is the basis for the demon drink.
Of course this means a rather long list of celebrities would be their own disease vector after the bars close. Stay away, Lindsay Lohan.
These are just some of the ways superbugs infect.
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Those days of cleaning wound, using alcohol is long gone because the brewers of ethanol have been using higher concentration of antibiotics in their fermentation technique to help them increase the yield.
We and the gel manufacturers have been trying hard to let nurses and doctors know they must not use alcohol gel as an alternative to washing their hands using water and soap. The reason is it takes time for alcohol to kill germs colonized in their hands. Using low concentrated alcohol gel will result in bacteria developing resistance.
In hospitals nurses and doctors swipe your arm using alcohol or chlorhexidine but do not allow time (drying time) before sticking a needle. This is a major problem because its you who get the infection and not the nurses or doctors.
Is there anything on this astral plane we don’t feed antibiotics?
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