Antibiotic Related Quotes

Today, antibiotics are as common as a cup of coffee. In the 1950s they were relatively new. Today, over-use has reduced their efficacy but in the 1950s they really were a miracle drug. Sister Monica Joan had never had penicillin before, and responded immediately.

since it sounds like from a . . . reputation standpoint”—he said the word “reputation” rolling his eyes a little, as if the concept of caring about what others thought were the dumbest thing since homeopathic antibiotics—“things cannot get any worse for you.

The most notorious story is the Trovan antibiotic study conducted by Pfizer in Kano, Nigeria, during a meningitis epidemic. An experimental new antibiotic was compared, in a randomised trial, with a low dose of a competing antibiotic that was known to be effective. Eleven children died, roughly the same number from each group. Crucially, the participants were apparently not informed about the experimental nature of the treatments, and moreover, they were not informed that a treatment known to be effective was available, immediately, from Médecins sans Frontières next door at the very same facility. Pfizer argued in court – successfully – that there was no international norm requiring it to get informed consent for a trial involving experimental drugs in Africa, so the cases relating to the trial should be heard in Nigeria only. That’s a chilling thing to hear a company claim about experimental drug trials, and it was knocked back in 2006 when the Nigerian Ministry of Health released its report on the trial. This stated that Pfizer had violated Nigerian law, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Declaration of Helsinki.

Michael Pollan: "The industrialization--and dehumanization--of American animal farming is a relatively new, evitable, and local phenomenon: no other country raises and slaughters its food animals quite as intensively or as brutally as we do." U.S. consumers may take our pick of reasons to be wary of the resulting product: growth hormones, antibiotic-resistant bacteria, unhealthy cholesterol composition, deadly E. coli strains, fuel consumption, concentration of manure into toxic waste lagoons, and the turpitude of keeping confined creatures at the limits of their physiological and psychological endurance.

You’re just living a normal life — never been sick, never been unhealthy, and all of a sudden you are fighting for your life. And this is happening to individuals every day,” Thomas said. The infection went to her blood stream and bone marrow and caused septic shock and organ failure. After undergoing multiple surgeries including a bone-marrow transplant and a “never-ending cycle of antibiotics,” she survived the ordeal.1​➔​ Thomas survived relatively intact. Some don’t, losing limbs in a desperate bid to stop the infection from spreading and then living permanently debilitated lives. Others aren’t even that “lucky.” Denis

The first thing I want to say about Boyfriend is that he’s an extraordinarily decent human being. He’s kind and generous, funny and smart, and when he’s not making you laugh, he’ll drive to the drugstore at two a.m. to get you that antibiotic you just can’t wait until morning for. If he happens to be at Costco, he’ll text to ask if you need anything, and when you reply that you just need some laundry detergent, he’ll bring home your favorite meatballs and twenty jugs of maple syrup for the waffles he makes you from scratch. He’ll carry those twenty jugs from the garage to your kitchen, pack nineteen of them neatly into the tall cabinet you can’t reach, and place one on the counter, accessible for the morning. He’ll also leave love notes on your desk, hold your hand and open doors, and never complain about being dragged to family events because he genuinely enjoys hanging out with your relatives, even the nosy or elderly ones. For no reason at all, he’ll send you Amazon packages full of books (books being the equivalent of flowers to you), and at night you’ll both curl up and read passages from them aloud to each other, pausing only to make out. While you’re binge-watching Netflix, he’ll rub that spot on your back where you have mild scoliosis, and when he stops, and you nudge him, he’ll continue rubbing for exactly sixty more delicious seconds before he tries to weasel out without your noticing (you’ll pretend not to notice). He’ll let you finish his sandwiches and sentences and sunscreen and listen so attentively to the details of your day that, like your personal biographer, he’ll remember more about your life than you will. If this portrait sounds skewed, it is.

How long have you two been married?” I asked her. “One month—today!” she answered with a little smile. “Well,” I said, “you have a bladder infection. In fact, this is a fairly common problem in newlyweds. It’s called honeymoon cystitis. It’s usually not serious. We’ll start some antibiotics tonight. You’ll need to get another urine test in a few days to be sure you’re responding to treatment.” “Why is it common in newlyweds?” she asked. “Well,” I said, “when a woman isn’t used to having sexual relations, sometimes a little infection can get into her bladder.

While I was working on C. fetus and C. jejuni in the early 1980s, a new relative of Campylobacter was discovered in, of all places, the stomach. Dubbed “gastric campylobacter-like organism” or GCLO (we now call it Helicobacter pylori),

When a troubled member of a traditional society went to the tribe’s healer, the healer didn’t open the discussion with questions like “How long have you been experiencing spleen discomfort?” or “What, exactly, is your deductible?” Instead he or she asked when the person stopped feeling spontaneous joy, stopped singing, stopped dreaming. In other words, wayfinders need to know when the sick, stuck, depressed, or failing patient stopped playing. Any confident traditional healer with access to modern medicine will gladly recommend a splint or antibiotics for someone with a broken leg or an infection, but for the soul sickness and stress-related illnesses that so bedevil many of us, wayfinders know that playing to the point of enchantment is necessary medicine.

Once irrigation has been accomplished, eyewear is typically not necessary, but the rescuer should still be wearing protective gloves. Remember to wash your hands before and after donning the gloves. Soap, water, and gloves are a tough trio on germs. In the absence of protective gloves, the rescuer may improvise with clean plastic bags over her or his hands. With relatively minor wounds, to prevent sharing germs, the patient may be directed in the management of his or her own wound (including control of blood loss). Contusion Bruises seldom require emergency care, but large bruises benefit from cold, compression, and/or elevation. Substantial bruises should cause you to assess the patient for damage to underlying structures, such as bones and organs. Large bruises should be protected from freezing in extremes of cold because a bruised area will freeze sooner than normal skin. Abrasions Abrasions are the exception to the rule of wound cleaning: You need to scrub within the wound to achieve adequate cleaning. A sterile gauze pad is adequate for scrubbing. Scrubbing may be enhanced by using any soap, but all soap should be carefully rinsed and then irrigated from the wound after scrubbing. Green Soap Sponges are packaged with soap and water already in the sponge, making them useful additions to first-aid kits. It is important to remove all embedded debris not only to reduce the risk of infection but also to prevent subsequent “tattooing” (scarring) of the skin. With a deep abrasion, self-scrubbing is seldom successful due to the high level of pain associated with the exposed nerves. After cleansing, abrasions can be kept moist to avoid desiccation and speed healing with microthin film dressings that can be left in place until healing occurs. Without microthin film dressings, a topical agent, such as an antibiotic ointment, can be applied, followed by a dressing of a sterile gauze pad or a roll of sterile gauze to keep the ointment in place. Tape, an elastic wrap, or some other holder may be used to hold a sterile gauze pad in place. Ideally, gauze dressings should be changed twice a day, or at least once a day, as well as any time the gauze gets wet.

After the Civil War battle at Shiloh, Tennessee, in 1862, thousands of injured soldiers were left lying in the mud, in some cases for two days and two nights, as the number of casualties on both sides was so great that it overwhelmed their armies' capacity to retrieve and treat them. Many died from their injuries and the consequent infections. But at night, some of the injured men noticed a strange blue glow emanating from their wounds. Their ghostly penumbra could be seen from a distance. Field surgeons observed that the soldiers who luminesced healed more quickly and had a higher survival rate than those who didn't. They called it the Angel's Glow. An explanation for the Angel's Glow was proposed 139 years later, when a seventeen-year-old high-school student, William Martin, acting on a hunch, persuaded his friend Jonathan Curtis to help him investigate. Their paper, which won a national science prize, argued that the soldiers appear to have been attacked by insect-eating nematodes in the soil contaminating their wounds. The nematodes regurgitated their bacteria, and the antibiotics these microbes produce are likely to have destroyed the other pathogens infecting the wounds. Because the luminous bacteria have evolved to infect insects, whose body temperature is lower than that of humans, the students speculated that only hypothermic soldiers were inoculated. When they were brought in for treatment, and warmed up, the bacteria that had saved them died, preventing complications. (A related species, adapted to mammalian temperatures, causes severe infections.)