Miss Ashley Pants

Well, it’s finally here.

The superbug of the century is here. But…you’ve heard that word before and you’re still alive… right? I mean MRSA didn’t kill you, personally. Avian flu (not quite the same, but it also caused a panic) “flew” right past you, am I right? So why should carpa- (eh… we’ll call it CRE for now, since the abbreviation is easier to remember than “carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae”). Anyway why should CRE cause such a freakout?

THANK YOU, SCIENTISTS.

Well, let’s put it this way. This is happening all the time. The only reason you aren’t dead or minus a leg from one bug or another is because swarms of scientists are tirelessly at work in a lab somewhere every day, making sure you aren’t. The difference now, is that CRE is resistant to…well.. pretty much everything. And you want to know the kicker? For those without a basic understanding of science (and even for those with it), it’s all your fault.

Think of the whole “survival of the fittest” thing. You already know how animals evolve to get longer necks to reach leaves or colorful feathers to mate, right? Well, it happens with the bad guys too. The only difference is that they can do it ridiculously more quickly, because they don’t take as long to reproduce. For my fellow spider haters, here’s an analogy:

ARACH-NALOGY

Imagine if you captured a non-pregnant spider and put it in a jar. Obviously, this is all hypothetical – mostly because I would squash it with a boot instead, but also because I’m making an analogy. Anyway, so yeah. Disgusting spider in a jar. You wake up the next day… and there are ten more. The next day, there are ten times that. By the third, you can’t even think straight because the jar is moving around on your counter with the force of all those evil legs. Why? Because these spiders can reproduce sans sexy-time and so quickly that they seem to multiply.

Not terrified yet?

SURVIVAL OF THE SCARIEST

Okay, fair enough. Then, let’s say some of the spiders are “super-spiders”. All the spiders can kill you if they bite you, but these super-spiders latch on to you, burrowing into your body when your immune system’s down, and eating you from the inside out by multiplying their awful progeny inside you who will also feast on your organs.

I mean, the other spiders can kill you too if you let them and don’t treat the bites. But up until now, we’ve had some amazing medicine-makers who can counteract them most of the time and keep them at bay. In other words, none of the spiders are really “good” to come in contact with, generally, but for now we’ll say – some of them are “less evil” and dangerous than others because of the “counteract” medicine.

The bummer is this: Every time you take the “counter-act medicine”, sure, the spiders will all die. Except one. The “mutation spider” lives on. And you might think, “Well, big deal. It’s just one.” But remember the jar? Within a few days, that one mutation spider will become ten, then fifty, then a hundred of the “mutation” spiders… just waiting for some human flesh to feast upon.

From inside the jar, it’s less likely they’ll mutate so much. But within the harsh terrain that is your body, each generation will have a “mutation spider” catered to battle your body. It may take a few generations to figure out how to fight your body fully, but they will. And that’s when the “mutation” becomes that “super spider”.

CONJUGATION

What’s worse? The “less evil” ones can become just as bad. If the “super-spider” bumps uglies with the relatively benign spiders – instead of getting preggo, the result of “spider sex” is that both of them now have the evil gene.

This whole “spider” analogy is essentially exactly what’s going on with bacteria and what has been for – well – forever. Antibiotics just speed up the process. The visual terror you’re being saved in not seeing a team of tarantulas parading into your bed, is well compensated for by the nuclear nightmare that is the truth. Think of CRE as being the miniature version of supercharged spiders coming after you. You can’t see them or squash them, and…worse… they can corrupt the other bacteria that hasn’t harmed you up until now via “gene sharing” called conjugation.

So what can you do?

DON’T BE THAT GUY

Well, the “counteract medicine” represents any and every antibiotic you’ve ever taken. Taking it is risky because there’s always the chance you’re singling out the antibiotic resistant bacteria (aka “mutation” and, eventually “super-spider”). Obviously, though, there are times when you really need it. So you want to do two things:

1. Finish all five days (or however many you’re supposed to) of medication. When you don’t finish the full course because you “feel better” on day three, you’re being what scientists refer to as a “douchebag”. You’re spreading invisible hell hounds you’ve been serving as a home/petri dish to with every sneeze you make, grocery cart you touch, and hand you shake. You’re killing your baby, even. Maybe.

2. Don’t take the antibiotics unless you’re sure you need to.

BACTERIA vs. VIRUS

Why wouldn’t you be sure you need to?

Well, that’s where the doctors come in. It’s not all your fault. You may have been ignorant up until the wonderful light I’ve shed, so you had an excuse. Now you don’t. And neither does your doc. Referring to the analogy – imagine that there are also robot spiders that occasionally infect you too, and they mimic the symptoms you get from a real, living spider.

So you go to the doctor, and he gives you the medicine without checking to see if you need it. Dick move. Why? Well, it won’t kill them (duh, they’re robots). So you’re taking this medicine that isn’t going to help, and all it is going to do is target the real living “spiders” that might be in you, and slowly single out the “mutation” spiders as they multiply.

This is pretty much what happens when doctors prescribe you an antibiotic (which kills bacteria) when you actually have a virus. Antibiotics are only for bacteria. (Protip: Bacteria = alive. Virus = not alive). That’s why you’ll usually hear, “Oooh you’ve got a virus. Should’a gotten a shot. Just gotta let it run it’s course. Take tamiflu….Get some rest… Bla, bla, blah”.

So how do you know which you’ve got?

Go to the doc’s the moment you start to feel ill, so that you can get a throat culture (or whatever test they do) before you feel like you’ve been hit by a bus. If your culture comes back positive for living critters, then you take the anti(against) biotic (life). Antibiotics, as their name suggests, can only kill living organisms attacking you. To take them when you’ve got something non-living that’s making you sick, is not only pointless, but also harmful: it propagates the “super bugs”… which is only marginally more frightening than wolf spiders with babies wriggling on them inasmuch as it could wipe out the world.

It’s interesting that misuse of our one weapon against super-bacteria could be our downfall… and prophetic that its name literally means “against life”.

That’s all. Class dismissed.

xoxo
<3~A