AN ALREADY DEADLY SUPERBUG BACTERIA IS NOW ABLE TO SURVIVE BY EATING PLASTICS
Superbugs are scary. And I’m not talking about the giant insects from the Carboniferous period millions of years ago. I’m talking about bacteria superbugs that are hard to treat, can kill you, and are doing their damage all over the world. But now one superbug in particular is changing the entire game. Pseudomonas bacteria infections (or Pseudomonas aeruginosa) do more than we already knew, which is affect your skin, blood, lings, GI track and other things. And yes, it can kill you. Yes, it’s resistant to anti-biotics. And yes, this superbug bacteria is so resistant that sometimes infected tissue is surgically removed. So what else can it do? Well, it can survive by eating plastics, is what.
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PLASTICS BUFFET ARE COMMONLY FOUND IN HOSPITALS:STENTS, SUTURES, EVEN BREAST IMPLANTS
And if that doesn’t immediately concern you it should. Because it means this superbug bacteria can survive on nothing but plastic. And, of course, we’re talking about medical-grade plastics. The kind you find in every hospital in the world, polycaprolactone (PCL). That plastic is often in sutures, dressings for wounds, stents, pharma drug patches and surgical mesh. Oh, AND breast implants. So even if safety, hygienic and sanitary protocols are insanely tight in any given hospital, this superbug bacteria can survive either on plastics without a human, or in a human on the plastics. For nerds like me this seems sort of cool in the abstract. But in reality it’s pretty much terrifying.
Related:
https://www.theblot.com/transplanted-kidney-rabies/
AND? SUPERBUG BACTERIA THAT EAT PLASTICS BECOME EVEN HARDER TO TREAT MEDICALLY
As it is, the superbug bacterial infection pseudomonas kills roughly 560,000 people a year. Many of those deaths involved people who had some kind of autoimmune deficiency. But even for healthy people it’s dangerous, and can cause sepsis, UTIs or skin, lung and blood infections. But now this superbug can survive just be eating readily available plastics, and in even worse news that sustenance makes it even more resistant to treatment. And that’s, well, scary as hell. Because we already barely knew how to treat these infections. And now not only has that gotten harder, there’s even more to figure out.
