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Biotech / Medical : Ligand (LGND) Breakout! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Arthur Radley who wrote (30241)	1/14/2000 12:31:00 AM
From: Torben Noerup Nielsen	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 32384

OT Tex, I'll read through it and comment. But I doubt it'll change my view much. We've been far too cavalier in our treatment of bacteria and viruses. And your approach isn't so great. It's not you who become immune; it's the bacteria. Should you have a visitation from one of the nastier members of the Streptococci family, you'd better hoof it and get your prescription for a healthy dose of antibiotics. If left untreated, some of them can do nice things like damage your heart valves. Some times surgery can fix that if you happen to survive, but there are other problems as well. You're probably old enough that sterility isn't a major issue so you might not have to worry about that... The problem as you presumably know is that people stop taking the antibiotics as soon as they ``feel better". Unfortunately, all that means is that you've got the bug on the run. The weakest ones are probably dead, but there may be a few strong ones still surviving. And if you don't kill them, they'll hang around and you'll end up with a stronger family of them. One problem with antibiotics that your approach does help is that of collateral damage. When you use antibiotics, you end up killing all sorts of other bacteria in your body. Most of them are probably simple symbionts that occupy an ecological niche in your internals. Unfortunately, antibiotics will wipe some of them out and could leave room for nastier ones to move in. You could also see some of these benign symbionts develop resistance and then later they might conjugate with nastier relatives and transfer their resistance to them. That could cause you problems. Resistant bacterial infections are a BIG problem. Consider the problem that TB used to be. Then we went and wiped it out. Or we thought we did. Unfortunately, there are now confirmed cases of TB that are completely resistant to anything we have to throw at them. Oh, by the way, TB is airborne and quite contagious. Right now, I believe that the really nasty strains have only been found in South East Asia. But all it takes is a business man on a pleasure trip to Bangkok... Maybe someone who travels a lot. Airports and planes are such a great place to spread these things. Or get it loose in an immune-compromised community in San Francisco.... I'm not prone to being horrified. And I guess I'm not in this case. I'm more awed by the power that bacteria have. We tend to think that Homo Sapiens is the highest achievement of evolution. I'm not so sure. Bacteria have been around much longer than we have and if we don't get with it, they may yet outlive us. No weapons we have ever built are capable of annihilating the bacterial world. If we made as many nuclear weapons as we possibly could and set them off at once, we might get a few percent. And those would be quickly regenerated. We of course would be dead. Cheers, Torben