LOL
Ok, few pieces of information.
- Sulfa drugs (OTC antibiotic creams) have been around since WWII. Don’t worry about using em. Its not like bacteria hasn’t had a chance to get exposed to it in the last 50 years.
The stuff in that cream is sulfa drugs. Like i said they’ve been around forever and they work to prevent the synthesis of the cell wall (rigid wall thingy that keeps the bacterium from exploding).
Sure some bacteria will get resistant to it, but since they are inside and causing an infection (every wound gets infected its just a question of severity) your immune system will clear it. That and in the 50 years we’ve used it we can still use it to kill common infections from cuts and scrapes.
2) Antibiotic soap and stuff.
Two catagories: 1) Crammed full of ethanol… Ethanol is the ultimate antibiotic. Its cheap, easy to make and kills everything… this is the sort of thing we use in the lab I work at. (we actually use 75% reagent grade ethanol mixed in h20)
2) It has trilosan. (spelling) Yet again its been out there for a while, but the thing is its not used for internal treatment (at least I haven’t heard of it being used that way) so if you do use it, it won’t create a strain of bacteria that will impact medical treatments. Worst case, you create a breed of bacteria in your dish rag which isn’t affected by it. Then you throw it out.
The take home message here about the antibiotic cream is that its the easiest way to kill bacteria and is cheap and harmless to humans. Are you making resistant bacteria? Yeah, but you’re killing anything that survive the cream anyway [well if you don’t you’re gonna get bloodpoisoning and die]. I wouldn’t worry about that.
You see, the antibiotic problem comes from stupidity of drug companies.
I would stay away from rubbing alcohol as biological systems don’t react well to denatured ethanol. Another nice aspect of the cream is that it blocks further entry to the wound (more or less) and it also will work its way down into the wound and hopefully kill anerobic bacteria.
What the medical profession is trying to get people to understand is that in the 40 years since we first developed all of these antibiotics (many were isolated from other bacterium that used antibiotics as a method for keeping away competition) more and more things are getting resistant to them. This mainly is the problem where you have a large popultion of bacteria being constantly exposed to antibiotics (aka hospitals). Because of this drug resistant bacteria is being found in hospitals which is bad since people in hospitals have compromised immune systems and deep open wounds (surgery). So what they are trying to do is cut down on the number of antiobiotics they prescribe, and those that are prescribed you need to take to prevent the infection from being partially cleared (and hence leaving some bacteria alive that have been exposed to the drugs alive).
So how does this impact you and the hang nail.
Use the antibiotic cream. Use the antibacterial soap (hell most of it isn’t even antibacterial)
As for your guesses:
1)Flesh eating bacteria has other mutations in it. Antibacteria soap/cream/whatever that you can buy over the counter won’t make it.
2) there is the whole concept of only isolated patches of bacteria will have antibiotic resistance. Unless you work in a hospital or work with large amounts of infectious bacteria and antiobiotics you won’t encounter a sulfa drug resistant strain. The cream will actually kill a lot of the bacteria.
Guess 3)Hell, you’re already several steps ahead of the people who bought all the cipro they could get their hands on. laughs his ass off I can’t imagine the number of people who had allergies and started popping those suckers by the handful.
The problem with cipro is that we only have 1 or 2 antibiotics that will kill heavy duty hospital infections and until we get more drug research done those have gotta last us.
Hope this helped
