Naked Science Forum
Life Sciences => Physiology & Medicine => Topic started by: Pseudoscience-is-malarkey on 11/07/2017 18:03:18
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Dying from infection these days only happens to people in undeveloped countries that do not have access to antibiotics/antivirals/antihelminthics/ et cetera. Or so I thought. A fellow American Youtuber died recently from just that. An infection that started with a swollen hand that progressed to the stuff of b-movies.
Perhaps he just took for granted the almost non-existent fatality rate of "simple" infections and felt it would simply go away? Apparently even the best medical professionals are confused by this one. Thoughts, inference?
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People can die from untreated infections, as always, and treatments are not always effective. It just happens that modern western society has eliminated most sources of involuntary infection and found means of treating most of what remains, provided we diagnose and treat early enough, so deaths that were commonplace even a hundred years ago now make headliines.
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Dying from infection these days only happens to people in undeveloped countries that do not have access to antibiotics ...
6% of all deaths in USA associated with severe sepsis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sepsis) ... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19250547 (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19250547)
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Humans are not the only ones with access to antibiotics.
Many infectious bacteria have also had access to antibiotics; and what doesn't kill them, just makes them stronger.
Many types of bacteria now have antibiotic resistance coded in their DNA - sometimes resistance to multiple types of antibiotics in a single bacterium.
These resistance genes are often noticed just 1 or 2 years after a new antibiotic is introduced. With the long development cycle and short effective lifetime of antibiotic products, large parts of the pharmaceutical industry have given up on their development.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimicrobial_resistance
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A patient died in our hospital a few years ago from overwhelming bacterial infection (Staph, from memory) secondary to a mosquito bite, which subsequently became infected, sustained while chopping a fallen tree in his garden. He was about 40 years old and previously in excellent health.
There are a lot of nasty bugs out there but, in general, our better nutritional state as a population means that fewer people succumb. But fewer is not none...
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When we have finished stenting the patient's arteries, irradiating his tumors, ventilating his lungs, faffing about with snake oil for Alzheimers, feeding him via a peg tube, shoving catheters and suppositories up every available orifice and generally prolonging his misery by all profitable means, most geriatrics die from pneumonia, just like the old days.
My next clinical project will be a suicide farm. Just like a hospice but with optional nitrogen instead of oxygen. Assisting suicide is still illegal but the law in England does not apply to those with lots of money: it takes up to 30 years to investigate wealthy criminals, so by the time the case is heard I'll be dead anyway.