tetano
Editor, Senior Moderator
The next time you pop an antibiotic, consider this: You may be helping a dormant virus mutate into an even more lethal killer. Mike Peters tells you how.
First there is a sniffle somewhere across the room, and in no time everybody around you in the office is sneezing. Half the people crowded onto the subway look like they should be home in bed. At some point, as you stand next to someone having a coughing fit, you might be forgiven for wondering: Is this the start of the next killer virus? It's scarier than any Halloween scenario. While several centuries have passed since the Black Death, a bubonic plague, wiped out about half the population of Europe, more recent super germs have been plenty lethal. SARS, avian flu and H1N1 seemed to have come in quick succession - and made a mockery of the available arsenal of drugs. Despite astonishing advances in modern medicine, mutant strains of viruses and bacteria continue to threaten human lives today.
Wang Hufeng, director of the Health Reform and Development Center at Renmin University of China, says new strains of drug-resistant "superbugs" are able to spread rapidly here and around the world because of air travel and the globalization of food sources.
But the biggest problem, he said at an International Health Leadership symposium this summer in Beijing, is the nation's "reckless overuse of antibiotics" in the health system and in agricultural production.
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http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/weekendextra/2011-10/30/content_14002450.htm
First there is a sniffle somewhere across the room, and in no time everybody around you in the office is sneezing. Half the people crowded onto the subway look like they should be home in bed. At some point, as you stand next to someone having a coughing fit, you might be forgiven for wondering: Is this the start of the next killer virus? It's scarier than any Halloween scenario. While several centuries have passed since the Black Death, a bubonic plague, wiped out about half the population of Europe, more recent super germs have been plenty lethal. SARS, avian flu and H1N1 seemed to have come in quick succession - and made a mockery of the available arsenal of drugs. Despite astonishing advances in modern medicine, mutant strains of viruses and bacteria continue to threaten human lives today.
Wang Hufeng, director of the Health Reform and Development Center at Renmin University of China, says new strains of drug-resistant "superbugs" are able to spread rapidly here and around the world because of air travel and the globalization of food sources.
But the biggest problem, he said at an International Health Leadership symposium this summer in Beijing, is the nation's "reckless overuse of antibiotics" in the health system and in agricultural production.
..
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/weekendextra/2011-10/30/content_14002450.htm