Word: bacteria
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...committee ruled that sentience is “morally relevant” because we cannot rule out the possibility of sentience. This is an utter bastardization of the skepticism that forms the foundation of modern science. We cannot prove that plants are not sentient. Similarly, we cannot prove that bacteria do not have opinions on the Iraq War or that algae don’t love. However, the traditional role of skepticism is to seek truth by discarding assumptions. The ECNH has reversed this practice by creating policy based on the implied existence of the unproven.Besides this bad science, there...
...Rutgers research reflects a much-needed, if slow, renewal of scientific interest in antibiotics development. The last two decades of the 20th century saw nearly zero progress, and in those years several disease-causing bacteria evolved resistance to commonly used drugs. Researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that more than 40% of staph infections in the U.S. in 2006 were MRSA - a bug that now kills more Americans a year than AIDS. Today, the first line of treatment against MRSA is vancomycin, a formidable antibiotic that has been around since the 1950s and is otherwise typically...
What has happened instead, says Zhenkun Ma, head of research at the Global Alliance for TB Drug Development, who was not involved in the new study, is that "we use really old drugs to fight a very new disease. TB evolves every day." So do all other bacteria. Increasingly, the old arsenal of antibiotics is losing power...
Ebright hopes myxopyronin will be especially useful in the battle against drug-resistant tuberculosis, a disease for which clinicians have never had a perfect therapy. The success of TB treatment depends on the destruction of active and dormant bacteria to prevent relapse - something that few existing antibiotics have been able to do. One way to kill a dormant cell is to target biochemical processes that continue even in latency - there aren't many of those. But myxopyronin works by interfering with the enzyme RNA polymerase, which controls gene transcription in cells and is necessary for cell survival, dormant...
Rifamycins, the main drugs currently used to treat tuberculosis, attack the same RNA polymerase target, but at a different site. That means the old drugs and the new drugs "should not have cross-resistance," says Ma. Any new drugs will work against bacteria that have developed resistance to current drugs, but won't interfere with the way the current drugs work...