This has nothing to do with bleach. The MR is MRSA stands for Methicillin Resistant. Methicillin and other members of the penicillin class do nothing for MRSA. Its not bleach resistant, its because of antibiotics abuse.
Also, athletes get it because of skin to skin contact of sports and close quarter activities like traveling on a bus/hotel together or sharing towels.
One contributing cause to driving up health costs are people like YOU, jtgain. By your actions, you are helping to breed antibiotic-resistant bacteria, leading to more involved and expensive courses of treatment.
And to state that “Most docs hand out antibiotics like they are candy anyways” is a blatant falsehood. In the past, physicians were indeed more likely to cave in to a patient’s demands and prescribe possibly unneeded antibiotics, or to prescribe them prophylactically (i.e preventatively).
These practices have all but ended. Physicians today are far less likely to prescribe an antibiotic unless the need for such is clearly indicated. If physicians do prescribe more expensive antibiotics, it is because past overuse has made the old standbys (like penicillin) less effective. Your actions continue this trend.
Yeah, right. :rolleyes: For simple, acute infections, I have NEVER seen antibiotics prescribed with a refill. Not only that, but I have always been emphatically instructed to finish the whole course of treatment. The only way to legitimately end up with leftover antibiotics is if you have an infection that does not respond to a particular antibiotic, and your doctor switches you to another. And what helps create antibiotic-resistant infection? Idiots who think that “their problem is cured” before they finished the full course of treatment.
I can hardly express how angry such behavior makes me. IMHO, it is selfish at a minimum, and for someone who blithely states their intent to continue such behavior even after being informed of the harm it causes, it borders on the sociopathic.
You might also consider the fact that not only does the abuse of antibiotics hurt all of us, it hurts you, too. The most likely people to first contract antibiotic-resistant infections are the people breeding them in the first place. That is, people like you.
You are being foolish because you don’t have the training to know which color “chiclet” is appropriate for your illness.
The CDC’s webpage on antibiotic misuse has lots of good info on what antibiotics are and aren’t good for: http://www.cdc.gov/getsmart/
And jtgain’s description of how he uses antibiotics makes me recoil in horror.
Any doctor that prescribes the way he reports as typical is not fit to practice, only to disimpact obstipated howler monkeys bare-handed.
And any patient who uses that approach to their health care risks consequences as dire as being disimpacted by a howler monkey.
I guess it must be possible - in any ordinary cleaning regime there will be areas only exposed to low concentrations of the cleaning chemicals - and there must be a threshold exposure dosage below which even chemicals like bleach are not immediately fatal to bacteria.
Not (as others have noted) that this would breed MRSA, but It should be at least conceivably possible for variously bleach-tolerant strains of bacteria to evolve.
I view people who abuse antibiotics similarly to the way I view anti-vaxxers: morons who make things worse for the weakest members of our society (the old, the very young, and the infirm) for their own short-sighted convenience or unwillingness to consult medical professionals appropriately.
The anti-vaxxers are making herd immunity weaker, and antibiotic poppers are making the infectious agents stronger, but the result is the same.
>but It should be at least conceivably possible for variously bleach-tolerant strains of bacteria to evolve.
Bleach essentially cooks them. I would be surprised if its possible to even build an immunity to this. Germs cannot have an immunity to a lot of things. Some chemicals just destroy the cell walls. No immunity there either.
http://www.reuters.com/article/scienceNews/idUSTRE4AC68720081113
Understood, however, resistance (I’m not talking about 100% resistance to high concentrations) could possibly arise in the form of thickened or toughened cell membranes, or by going into spore as a response to exposure, or something like that.
According to my Google search results, there are apparently such things as bleach-resistant bacteria anyway - what can happen once, for whatever reason, can happen more than once.
Well, there’s one other legitimate way…if the patient develops an allergy to that particular antibiotic. I’ve developed allergies to antibiotics that I could previously take. I’ve done this five times. I always promptly stop taking the antibiotic and inform my doctor the next day. I then get a prescription for a new antibiotic. But I will never take the rest of the antibiotics that I’m allergic to.
Not in my experience. Of course, I’m a rather informed patient, and I ask things like “Do you think that this is a bacterial infection, a virus, yeast, what?” and “Will it get better without medicine?” In return, my doctor says “Hmmm, that yeast infection on your skin isn’t clearing up with Nystatin? Let’s try a different anti-yeast medicine, then. You can buy this stuff (showing me the generic name of a medicine) over the counter, and if you get the stuff that’s meant for vaginal yeast infections, then it’ll be cheaper than the smaller tubes, and just as effective as anything I can prescribe.”
I have heard of patients who insist on getting a prescription before they leave the doctor’s office, in the belief that antibiotics will cure ANYTHING. And perhaps some doctors do prescribe Amoxicillin or something similar just to get those dunderheads out of their office. But these days, all the doctors that I go to are careful to prescribe what I need, and ONLY what I need. And they tell me to finish the whole course of the antibiotics, too.
Doctors can do a lot, but patients have a responsibility for their own treatment, too.