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In Case You've Run Out of Things to Worry About
There's always the pandemic superbug:
A virulent type of community-acquired MRSA “superbug” that attacks healthy, young people has been found to be the descendent of a penicillin-resistant strain that caused serious infections worldwide 50 years ago.Scientists fear that this offspring superbug strain - which causes serious boils and abscesses and can lead to a severe pneumonia - could pose a major public health threat in the future.
Includes a strain that causes pneumonia nasty enough to kill you in 24 hours. That's a spicy meatball!
Well, if it's still controllable by vancomycin, we're in a very good position. Something like this doesn't worry me too much - for the most part, if you start to feel that sort of bad, you end up at the doctor's immediately. From there, getting you on antibiotics isn't a particularly difficult proposition.
What does worry me is that someone might happily engineer a multi-drug resistant small pox vaccine (at this point, we believe the Russians have done it and put it into weapons-delivery systems, along with potentially selling it to North Korea). That's virulent enough that, if it were to hit a major city like NYC, LA, Chicago, DC, or some other major hub (goddess forbid it gets dropped in a hub airport like Atlanta), then we're all in runny nasty feces up to our armpits...
Posted by: ronaprhys on April 1, 2005 09:50 AM