Pneumonia Outbreak Could Destroy Us All
Remember how the apocalypse was supposed to happen this year? Well, it’s here.
Doctors are battling an antibiotic-resistant bacteria, according to U.S. News and World Report: "In at least 37 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico, doctors have identified bacteria, including E. coli, that produce Klebsiella pneumoniae carbapenemase, or KPC — an enzyme that makes bacteria resistant to most known treatments." KPC, you should know, is "superbacteria that are hard to kill."
The pneumonia superbug is mostly prevalent in hospitals and has a mortality rate that hovers around 50 percent. Doctors are being advised to keep patients diagnosed with the KPC-producing bacteria isolated. The not-as-bad news is that only seems to go after those with compromised immune systems. There's even more bad news, however…
The superbug problem is getting bigger. According to a recent study by the University of Iowa’s School of Public Health, your grocery-store pork contains a strain of drug-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) bacteria. Of the samples tested in grocery stores in Iowa, Minnesota and New Jersey, one in 15 came back positive.
Before you brush all this superbug talk off by citing the National Pork Board’s reassurance that livestock strains of drug resistant bacteria has little effect on people, think again. Tara Smith, lead author of the Iowa study, notes, “These are common human strains,” Smith said. “[They] do cause infections in people.”
Time to bust out the SARS mask and start hoping the zombies get us before the drug-resistant bacteria does.
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