New superbug strain loose in the community

[chilli]

I think the whole 'urine is sterile' thing is a bit exaggerated, in an absolute ideal world it is sterile while its inside you. We, however, do not live in an ideal world and we rarely come into contact with pee while its still in someone elses bladder.

Call me paranoid but I wont be getting peed on by a girl with hepatitis if I can help it, nor will I touch anyones pee unless I really know them well.

Also, it's not sterile if you have an infection of the bladder/urinary tract.

The lesson to be learned... don't drink wees!

[MindExpansion]

Yeh, I think the idea behind the urine is sterile thing is that the urea keeps it fairly sterile. Typically there shouldn't be microorganisms in the bladder, but in the urinary tract there will be but they are just the sort of normal flora you find everywhere on the body. They are not that numerous in the UT because the typically sterile urine washes through once every few hours and the chemical and physical interaction here typically keeps numbers fairly low. But like SC said, you can get an infection if your host defences are weak or you do something to introduce more than the normal amount of natural flora into the wrong place, or a micro-organism that isn't part of the natural flora of the urinary tract is introduced and becomes established. In this case urine would likely not be sterile (but hey, it may actually still be quite close to it because any microorganism washed off the urinary tract wall may be killed by the urine quite quickly meaning just the actual tract, to which micro-organisms have adhered, is no longer 'sterile'.)

Peace

[chilli]

BTW MindExpansion, I asked the old lady how many doctors she reckons knowingly prescribe antibiotics for viruses etc, and she reckons there would be very, very few who hadn't!

[MindExpansion]

Yeh I had a chat to someone also, they think it probably happens a lot too, for pretty much the reason I said. Just so the patient thinks they are getting some treatment, in fact apparently some Dr's call Amoxicillin vitamin A, so people get a cold, go to their Dr, the doc says 'take this, you'll be better in 5 days' (which, being the nature of a common cold, they would be anyway) and they go away and take the pills, get better and think 'wow that Dr is great'.

Also, there is the aspect of covering one's ass in this ever more litigious society, so because the initial presentations of viral and bacterial infections can be difficult to distinguish if there are no really specific markers, the doc may give antibiotics just in case, because you're less likely to be sued for prescribing unnecessary antibiotics than for missing a potential bacterial infection... the increase in litigation within society does make Dr's lives very much harder in many ways.

There was just recently an outbreak of vancomycin resistant enterococchi (I think it was enterococchi) in a large regional hospital here in aus. And I think I said before, vancomycin is pretty much our last line of defence, it is not commonly used because it is super expensive (literally worth more than gold weight for weight) and it can't be taken orally. But when an MRSA pops up, it is essentially our last line. So when an organism becomes resistant to vancomycin, we have a problem, and there is very little we can do to destroy in the infection.

But these organisms would be evolving anyway, they are amazing, anyone who is interested should really have a read of the ways they develop resistance, from incorporating efflux pumps that fit the antibiotic, to mutating the site the antibiotics target, and a few others in between, crazy stuff, super fast evolution. The things we talked about, like doctors overprescribing AB's simply drive the evolution a little harder.

Peace,

Mind