DRUG-RESISANT BLACK DEATH

I have a whole box of handy dandy silver St Cuthbert medallions on a chain. Wear it around yer neck and never worry about the plague. I got other medals of patron saints too. Ya get headaches, I got it all here. 3 easy payments of 9.95 plus a small chatrge for shipping and handling.

Re: DRUG-RESISANT BLACK DEATH


Thanks for the update!

From the Wikipedia:

Treatment

An Indian doctor of Russian-Jewish origin Vladimir Havkin was the first to invent and test a plague antibiotic.

The traditional treatments are:

Streptomycin 30 mg/kg IM twice daily for 7 days
Chloramphenicol 25-30 mg/kg single dose, followed by 12.5-15 mg/kg four times daily
Tetracycline 2 g single dose, followed by 500 mg four times daily for 7-10 days (not suitable for children)
More recently,

Gentamicin 2.5 mg/kg IV or IM twice daily for 7 days
Doxycycline 100 mg (adults) or 2.2 mg/kg (children) orally twice daily
have also been shown to be effective.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bubonic_Plague#Treatment

and a novena to ST Cuthbert.

Streptomycin and Tetracylin, methinks ,are the ones which are the plagueisshowing resistance to.

If I remember correctly,this is something to do with soil bacteria exchanging genes with plague bacteria.

Here you go. May as well skip to the conclusion.

http://aac.asm.org/cgi/content/full/50/10/3233





Me, I'm more concerned about the new-and-nasty TB, but, then, rats and fleas are well-controlled in my corner of the world.

Yeah, and as water becomes more difficult to process, guess what?!

Ummmmm................. I'll drink more beer?

When Regan was still alive, some rats carrying the plague were found near his CA ranch. They're still with us.

That's not surprising. There's plague all over CA in the ground squirrel population.

Check out http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/dvbid/plague/epi.htm to see if there's plague where you live!

However, if you look at http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/dvbid/plague/facts.htm , you find that there are very few actual human cases of plague. Conditions have to be just right for spread, and unless you actually get infected it doesn't matter what antibiotics do or do not work against the bacterium (Yersinia pestis).

Really, you should be concerned about antibiotic resistance in run-of-the-mill (or at least common) infectious agents. Critical care ward are increasingly finding strains of Staphylococcus aureus and Pseudomonas spp., for instance, that aren't responsive to any of the conventional antibiotics, and document multidrug resistance has been rising rapidly over the past decade.

Unless we find a new class (or two) of antibiotics -- and use them judiciously -- the era of the miracle drug may be coming to an end less than a century after it began.

Most of our relative freedom from infectious disease stems from basic sanitation, not antibiotics. I was not aware that plague was related to water treatment, though.

Um, nor was I.






And don't forget vaccination, rog.

I don't think plague vaccination is awfully effective, and gives a short lived protection. Okay for people that have to handle dead rodents, but not the rest of us.

But you meant vaccinations, in general. Yes, add that to the list.

In general.

And since we're running this one, we should tip our caps to the pied piper of Hamlin, as well, I suppose.

Roger, I wasn't referring specifically to water treatment as a protection against plague but rather what humanity will do when our population is very high and water -- to keep ourselves clean -- will be in short supply.

You all just reminded me to get vaccinated for the chicken pox, I never got them and my mom thought she got me vaccinated, but she was wrong...