So having been sick this week I got to thinking about Penicillin and why it is so damn hard to get. You know what I mean, you have to get a prescription, which means either hanging out in the ER room for 3 hours (sign me up for that fun) or trying to get into your doctor (because Lord knows they can't write you one over the phone) which could take 3 weeks! So I thought I would just Google it to see if I could find a recipe on the web. No luck. Which of course begs the question, if I can get directions on how to make Crystal Meth in my kitchen and Bombs in my basement, why can't I get info to make Penicillin? I mean it is just rot, right? You should be able to grow it simply enough in a bowl! So I asked my friend Michelle (she is the one with the big hat, she needs it, she has a staggeringly huge brain!) why you can't make Penicillin at home. 'Wouldn't that be great', I say. 'No', she says, 'Superbug.' According to Michelle, if people could whip up Penicillin for themselves they would do so everytime they had a sniffle, thereby speeding the human race to the precipice of drug resistance. But I have to say I think this is a conspiracy to overbook doctors and keep ER's busy at 3am on a Tuesday morning. I don't understand why I can't have this information. Is Penicillin the new atom bomb?
Friday, March 10, 2006
Super Bug, Smooker Bug
So having been sick this week I got to thinking about Penicillin and why it is so damn hard to get. You know what I mean, you have to get a prescription, which means either hanging out in the ER room for 3 hours (sign me up for that fun) or trying to get into your doctor (because Lord knows they can't write you one over the phone) which could take 3 weeks! So I thought I would just Google it to see if I could find a recipe on the web. No luck. Which of course begs the question, if I can get directions on how to make Crystal Meth in my kitchen and Bombs in my basement, why can't I get info to make Penicillin? I mean it is just rot, right? You should be able to grow it simply enough in a bowl! So I asked my friend Michelle (she is the one with the big hat, she needs it, she has a staggeringly huge brain!) why you can't make Penicillin at home. 'Wouldn't that be great', I say. 'No', she says, 'Superbug.' According to Michelle, if people could whip up Penicillin for themselves they would do so everytime they had a sniffle, thereby speeding the human race to the precipice of drug resistance. But I have to say I think this is a conspiracy to overbook doctors and keep ER's busy at 3am on a Tuesday morning. I don't understand why I can't have this information. Is Penicillin the new atom bomb?
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3 comments:
Your friend Michelle is totally right!! People have been doing 2 things to increase the resitence of virus' to penicillin. One, they don't finish off their entire meds, thereby leaving some virus in their system, the strong kind that managed to make it through a number of doses, and two, people go to the doctor to get penicillin for bacterial infections (like colds and such for which penicillin does nothing). This is such a topic for me because it's one of the things I feel strongly about! Firstly, we have to let our bodies fight off some stuff so that we have our own natural antibodies and secondly, we have to be aware the virus' are much more adaptable than us. They can mutate at a rate we can't keep up with, and if they become immune to penicillin, how long do you think it will take us to find a new drug? Longer than it will take them to evolve their way onto a killer virus.
Whoa, I gotta get off the soapbox. Sorry for my rant, Heidi!!
penicillin only works on bacteria, viruses do not have cures at this point in time.
if you've been taking antibiotics to combat viruses you're doing a lot more harm than the folks you're trying to rant about...might want to consider revising your comment once you get your definitions straight.
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