#infections

My husband who worked in healthcare gasped when he looked at the graphs. Our immune systems have been damaged by Covid. Click on the link View on Twitter to see the post

A few people have asked me where the graphs come from. This is the work of someone who has looked at the data and posted their observations. If you can't access Twitter to see the rest of the post then I cant help you. There are explanations there about the graphs.. I am sorry I can't give you more information. I tried to copy more of this thread but Tumblr won't recognize the link. As far as I know the information is valid, but as we all know you must question everything today.

I went back and copied 2 of the sources used for the graphs in the thread. There were some questions for others on the data used, and this was what the person who posted said he used. I do not have the background to ascertain how accurate the graphs are. This is the best I can do.

Other graphs were also posted which were discussed.

"When bloodstream infections set in, fast treatment is crucial — but it can take several days to identify the bacteria responsible. A new, rapid-diagnosis sepsis test could cut down on the wait, reducing testing time from as much as a few days to about 13 hours by cutting out a lengthy blood culturing step, researchers report July 24 [2024] in Nature.

“They are pushing the limits of rapid diagnostics for bloodstream infections,” says Pak Kin Wong, a biomedical engineer at Penn State who was not involved in the research. “They are driving toward a direction that will dramatically improve the clinical management of bloodstream infections and sepsis.”

Sepsis — an immune system overreaction to an infection — is a life-threatening condition that strikes nearly 2 million people per year in the United States, killing more than 250,000 (SN: 5/18/08). The condition can also progress to septic shock, a steep drop in blood pressure that damages the kidneys, lungs, liver and other organs. It can be caused by a broad range of different bacteria, making species identification key for personalized treatment of each patient.

In conventional sepsis testing, the blood collected from the patient must first go through a daylong blood culturing step to grow more bacteria for detection. The sample then goes through a second culture for purification before undergoing testing to find the best treatment. During the two to three days required for testing, patients are placed on broad-spectrum antibiotics — a blunt tool designed to stave off a mystery infection that’s better treated by targeted antibiotics after figuring out the specific bacteria causing the infection.

Nanoengineer Tae Hyun Kim and colleagues found a way around the initial 24-hour blood culture.

The workaround starts by injecting a blood sample with nanoparticles decorated with a peptide designed to bind to a wide range of blood-borne pathogens. Magnets then pull out the nanoparticles, and the bound pathogens come with them. Those bacteria are sent directly to the pure culture. Thanks to this binding and sorting process, the bacteria can grow faster without extraneous components in the sample, like blood cells and the previously given broad-spectrum antibiotics, says Kim, of Seoul National University in South Korea.

Cutting out the initial blood culturing step also relies on a new imaging algorithm, Kim says. To test bacteria’s susceptibility to antibiotics, both are placed in the same environment, and scientists observe if and how the antibiotics stunt the bacteria’s growth or kill them. The team’s image detection algorithm can detect subtler changes than the human eye can. So it can identify the species and antibiotic susceptibility with far fewer bacteria cells than the conventional method, thereby reducing the need for long culture times to produce larger colonies.

Though the new method shows promise, Wong says, any new test carries a risk of false negatives, missing bacteria that are actually present in the bloodstream. That in turn can lead to not treating an active infection, and “undertreatment of bloodstream infection can be fatal,” he says. “While the classical blood culture technique is extremely slow, it is very effective in avoiding false negatives.”

Following their laboratory-based experiments, Kim and colleagues tested their new method clinically, running it in parallel with conventional sepsis testing on 190 hospital patients with suspected infections. The testing obtained a 100 percent match on correct bacterial species identification, the team reports. Though more clinical tests are needed, these accuracy results are encouraging so far, Kim says.

The team is continuing to refine their design in hopes of developing a fully automated sepsis blood test that can quickly produce results, even when hospital laboratories are closed overnight. “We really wanted to commercialize this and really make it happen so that we could make impacts to the patients,” Kim says."

Your whumpee has to be instructed how to perform surgery over the radio/phone/from someone in the next cell over.

Maybe they're performing it on themselves - or maybe performing it on someone else.

in a post apocalyptic society we wouldnt really have antibiotics. so what would getting something like strep or staff or similar be like without these, but with the knowledge of what it is/how youre SUPPOSED to treat it

like it wouldnt be like before the antibiotics and treatments came, because we have more knowledge. and we have a “oh its just x youll be fine” mentality that in this scenario we would not be able to afford to have

if that makes any sense

Interesting question.

Supportive therapy (everything you do for a bacterial infection that isn't antibiotics) honestly hasn't changed all that much since the 1930s: keep the person fed and hydrated, keep the person comfortable, keep the person clean, keep vital signs generally within normal ranges, prevent spread to others, etc... Exactly how we do those things has changed somewhat, but the ideas are the same.

There are also a few things we can do for specific infections (usually that we do in addition to antibiotics), like draining and packing an abscess, debriding a wound, using hot compresses for skin infections, or positioning people for optimal drainage in pneumonia. But we had a lot of these techniques in the 1930s, and genuinely the one big reason more people survive infections today is antibiotics.

I do agree that we've gotten too comfortable with bacterial infections. Without (and sometimes even with) antibiotics they're really deadly, and have a lot of long-lasting and very disabling consequences beyond just death.

For example- take strep. Group A Strep causes a number of conditions, including strep throat, scarlet fever, impetigo, cellulitis (including necrotizing faciitis), and a deadly whole-body infection known as iGAS (invasive group A strep). But if you get any one of these, and don't treat it with antibiotics, not only can it be deadly (in the case of necrotizing faciitis and iGAS) but it can cause certain problems later, like acute rheumatic fever and post-streptococcal glomerulonephritis which occur 1-5 weeks after infection.

Acute rheumatic fever occurs because, to the immune system, the strep bacteria look a lot like some of the body's own cells. So in its haste to attack the bacteria, it also attacks some cells of the heart and joints, causing inflammation of the heart muscle, severe joint pain, fever, and, for some reason, irregular and uncontrollable movements.

In post-streptococcal glomerulonephritis, a similar thing is happening but with the kidneys. This causes them to malfunction, causing swelling, high blood pressure, and decreased urine output, along with protein and blood in the urine.

He'd probably have like so many different infections down there if it weren't for his healing factor