Bigger, Badder Infections Spreading in Clusters Written by Melissa Gordon | October 20 2004
Doctors around country are facing patients who come back with infections that are not cured by antibiotics they prescribed. A staph resistant bacteria strain is becoming more and more common and our doctors need to start draining abscesses and taking cultures again. The new resistant staff requires fast treatment with specific antibiotics such as Cipromyacin and macrolids. Natural substances that fight and prevent bacterial infection include colloidial silver, Transfer Factor, garlic and Samento. Daniel Jernigan, an Epidemiologist at U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is quoted as saying "Staph infections are such a common problem that emergence of infections resistant to common antibiotics has important public health implications." Dr. Bonnie Bock, an infectious disease specialist in Newport Beach, California says "Most doctors are just not aware of this." She has treated whole groups of secretaries, gay men and others for resistant staph infections. She estimates two-thirds of staph abscesses she currently encounters are caused by resistant strain. These infections are unexpectedly aggressive; they multiply faster and make more of a toxin that inhibits our immune systems. If they aren't treated with right antibiotics quickly, they can easily become life threatening. According to Elizabeth Bancroft, a medical epidemiologist at Los Angeles County Department of Health Services, around year 2002 incidence of staph resistant infections rose dramatically in Los Angeles area. Then, during spring of 2004, The Angeles Health Department was informed of a mini-epidemic of staph infections in a group of healthy newborns as well as an outbreak in a county jail, a cluster of infection within gay male community and a cluster in a professional football team; bacteria causing outbreaks were nearly identical.
| | Medical Heretics Attack Miracle Cure Treatment Written by Melissa Gordon | October 20 2004
Biotherapies are sensible answers to our illnesses: they use substances and cells our body normally uses to reverse condition by mimicking behavior of healthy people’s cells In Australia these therapies are thriving; one of more common therapies is to take some white fighter cells from a cancer patient and vaccinate it to cancer inside person, telling it “hey this is what you need to fight”. The white cells are then grown in laboratory to larger numbers and reinjected into patient. It works brilliantly with no side effects. This same technique can be applied to many serious and chronic illnesses, such as Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease and life threatening infections. To top it all off, often it is less expensive than traditional surgery, chemotherapy, radiation and drug cocktail treatments. This is great right? All they do is assist your body, no strange substances or uncomfortable side effects. Well, in interest of ‘safety’ these therapies are in process of becoming will tightly regulated to a point that makes them overly costly and cumbersome to produce The culprit in Australia: Federal Therapeutic Goods Administration. The TGA argues that treatments in this category, such as transplanted organs and cells from a donor that are mass produced and injected into other people are highly likely to spread infections and rot because they are ‘alive’. The other scare tactic employed is case of 18-year-old Jesse Gelsinger who, during gene therapy trials, died at University of Pennsylvania in 1999. Gene therapy is where doctors use dangerous virus’s to infect many cells in body with a new set of DNA instructions. This is a very sad story and these therapies obviously need to be regulated but, what does this have to do with growing a persons own white cells in a lab and putting them back into same person have to do with these high risk treatments? In terms of risk to patient there is no comparison between gene therapy and organ transplants and white cell culturing.
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