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Re:Deadly Whooping Cough, Once Wiped Out, Is Back by philwelch on Monday August 16, 2010 @05:19PM (#1609313)
I've actually had MRSA. For many cases they just use different antibiotics for it, combined with physically cleaning the infection site. Mine was small, but my mom had a much larger infection which simply took more time and effort to apply similar techniques. (Fun fact: walking into a student health clinic with a MRSA sore on your arm, walking to the nurse's desk, holding up your arm and asking "what's this?" will get you seen very promptly!)

Turns out the primary treatment for antibiotic-resistent bacteria is to use older antibiotics. Bacteria only become resistant to antibiotics that have recently been used--antibiotics that have fallen out of use, there's no evolutionary pressure for bacteria to remain resistant to, so within a number of generations of not encountering that antibiotic, bacteria are suddenly vulnerable to it.

The medium term solution is to have between 4 and 6 generations of antibiotics, so hopefully we can just cycle around them as the bacteria catch up. Antibiotic resistance is nothing new, it's just another problem to be solved. NDM-1 may or may not be a major curveball. Personally, until I know for sure, I'll leave the worrying up to the people whose job it is to worry about such things and try to avoid going to India for any elective surgeries anytime soon.

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