The Futile Cycle

A recommendation comes to stop routinely prescribing antibiotics for acute bronchitis, since most commonly it’s a viral infection (antibiotics only work against bacteria). From what I personally see, I think antibiotics are prescribed much too often and for the wrong reasons. I’m not saying I necessarily agree with this study; I don’t know the statistics for the disease, so there may be good reasons to widely prescribe antibiotics. Perhaps most bronchitis patients seen are the elderly, in which case, even if there’s only a 20% chance that it’s bacterial, it’s probably better to be safe and just prescribe the antibiotic.

But in general, people seem to treat antibiotics way too cavalierly, doctors and patients alike. Patients don’t finish their regimen, which can lead to a rebloom of their infection, except this time with resistant bacteria. As for doctors, I’ve definitely had a few hand me a prescription for antibiotics when I most definitely didn’t have a bacterial infection (this is what they told me). They told me it was “just in case.” I can understand that if I’m old and weak, but I’m a frickin’ teenager. I have an immune system that can deal with bacteria, and I’m not at risk of sepsis (i.e. a strange overreaction of the body to infection, which has a high mortality rate). What’s the point?

Misprescribing antibiotics can also lead to lots of uncomfortable side effects for no good reason, including the death of your intestinal, symbiotic E. coli, which are not only responsible for the production of nutrients your body doesn’t normally produce or ingest, but also responsible for suppressing the growth of other nasties, such as the bacterium C. difficile, the growth of which can cause severe inflammation of the intestine. Since E. coli contributes to a large portion of stool, antibiotics often cause diarrhea by killing off the bacteria in the stool. In addition, the E. coli that survive will naturally be more prone to have antibiotic resistance, which can be harbored and then spread to other bacteria that may later invade your system (bacteria have no qualms about swapping DNA across species).

Antibiotics are a collective resource, especially broad spectrum antibiotics, which target nearly all bacteria. The more we use them, the more useless they become. Vancomycin, long the ultimate trump card against bacteria, is no longer the “antibiotic of last resort”, since vancomycin resistance has started to appear, particularly in hospitals. Penicillin, of course, is pretty much useless now, and doctors rarely prescribe it (for that reason, and also since some people seem to develop rapid allergies to it).

Abuse of antibiotics is one of those few issues that I care about. I refuse to buy antibacterial “things”, like soap and toothbrushes. (my roommate makes fun of me for this). A detergent will kill most any microbe (or wash it away), so there’s no need to add things like antibacterials, which only leads to their faster nullification. It annoys me deeply that a vancomycin analogue (avoparcin) is widely used in farms (for reasons that are not well understood, it seems to fatten livestock).

Thus, the less people use antibiotics in general, the better (all other things being equal, of course). And when you get prescribed antibiotics, take them all, or you’ll just be contributing to the erosion of our overall health.

Lately, experimental high-energy particle physics (HEPP) is getting harder to do, mostly because it becomes more and more expensive to run the particle accelerators that are the workhorse of HEPP. For the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), however, they’re figuring out something else to do with their expensive accelerator: the Linac Coherent Light Source.

Essentially, they’re going to use the linear accelerator to jiggle electrons and coax them into emitting X-rays. What for? To create a giant, short-pulsed X-ray laser! Why?

Well, X-rays are currently used to study the atomic structures of a lot of different molecules, from synthetic materials to proteins and protein clusters. Right now, because of the damage caused by X-rays to the imaging substrate, we need crystals of the material in order to get a proper image. With the fast X-ray pulsed laser, though, we can get a snapshot of the molecule with the laser in a very short time, getting a picture of our target before it decomposes.

In addition, the pulse laser means we can see the structure of things in short time points, which means we can take snapshots of chemical reactions in progress! By combining this technology with the crossed molecular beam methods developed at Harvard by Dudley Herschbach could revolutionize chemistry, biology, and physics!