Antibiotics

[Hrusai]

BP although that is true, usage of different antibiotics does help, and in a SHTF situation, you aint gonna be picky, and at any rate its only the more common ones that are so freely available, personally ive never heard of the majority of that list!.....also give it a few years and there will be antibiotics that'll take bacteria 100's if not 1000's of years to develope resistance to, the main reason behind that is because all of the antibiotics we use today are almost exclusively derived from plants and are therefore present in nature, anything that is present in nature for an extended period WILL have been in contact with bacteria at some stage, therefore bacteria have had plenty of time to develope immunity to almost all of antibiotics that we use,

as an example ; http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21...coast.html

if "superbugs" can be found in antactica we're buggered xD....but the worst thing about bacterial resistance to antibiotics is horizontal transmission of genes, this is a process whereby a bacterium passes a chunk of dna (like the antibiotic resistance part) to another bacterium (not necessarily of the same species either, which in my opinion is the scariest part of that)...this chunk will then either be incorporated into the bacteriums main chunk of circular dna, or become a plasmid which is just a seperate chunk of dna from the main chunk, but it still gets expressed.

ok so that sounded pretty grim, but im getting to my point now, the reason that resistance to antibiotics is developed so quickly, is because the genes have already evolved and are already out there in nature! theres no telling how long its taken to evolve these immunities, and medical and chemical science is at a bit of a juncture at the moment, with new advances in novel molecules and nano technology as well as increased understanding of the human body, we are on the cusp of being in the position to design totally new antibiotics, ones never before seen by those damned bacteria, ones which would take 100's if not 1000's of years for them to develope resistance to, there are even people working on hijacking parts of virus (not the whole virus) to have an exceptionally well targeted drug delivery system both for treatment of various conditions (yep cancer is on this list) and even specific bacteria! not only will using this method to kill bacteria be highly effective, but it wont make even a dent on your good bacteria population! (after all we are 90% bacteria. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/200...085914.htm )

at any rate there a chunk of information, im fairly sure i didnt make any mistakes but im going entirely off memory here so please forgive any ive made

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cheers for that tibbs! ill look into that