Northern California Bacteria Case Study

Hunting the Nightmare Bacteria documentary has had me paranoid. It’s scary to think foreign bacteria can enter your body and shut it down. The most informing information was the NDM-1 wasn’t a bacteria it was a resistance gene that can turn bacteria into superbugs. I do think antibiotics are being over used. I agree with M.D Arjun Srinivasan,” the more you expose a bacteria to an antibiotic, the greater the likelihood that resistance to that antibiotic is going to develop. So the more antibiotics we put into people, we put into the environment, the more opportunities we create for these bacteria to become resistant”.

In the last decade, the number of prescriptions for antibiotics has increases. Even though, antibiotics are helpful, an excess amount of antibiotics can be dangerous. Quite often antibiotics are wrongly prescribed to cure viruses when they are meant to target bacteria. Antibiotics are a type of medicine that is prone to kill microorganisms, or bacteria. By examining the PBS documentary Hunting the Nightmare Bacteria and the article “U.S. government taps GlaxoSmithKline for New Antibiotics” by Ben Hirschler as well as a few other articles can help depict the problem that is of doctors prescribing antibiotics wrongly or excessively, which can led to becoming harmful to the body.

Twenty-one years ago, my parents received the devastating news that my lungs were not developing properly and as a result my mom had an induced labor. I was born as a premature baby, weighing only 3 lbs. and was placed in the care of neonatal nurses in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) for 18 days. While my mom came to visit me, she would notice how well the nurses would care for me. Though their jobs were tough, the nurses would often carry me while I was crying and would often talk me to sleep, sometimes singing lullabies.

In order to diagnose this patient with this bacterium, I would place an order for a blood culture. Blood cultures are indicated in patients with sepsis, severe skin and soft tissue infections, or unstable vital signs; example massive organ failure. Blood cultures

1. Down the respiratory tract into the lungs. Coughs, cold, influenza and other common airborne infections are contracted in this fashion.

Meningococcal disease is a disease that can be found worldwide. Meningococcal disease refers to any disease or illness that is caused by the type of bacteria called Neisseria meningitides, also called meningococcus (Meningococcal disease, 2015). The first documented outbreak was over two hundred years ago in Geneva in 1805 which circulated rapidly and killed thirty three people. The first case ever recorded in America was in 1806 in Medford, Massachusetts (Fredericks, n.d.). A European physician, Professor A Weichselbaum, discovered the cause of the mysterious cerebro-spinal meningitis illness in 1887 and Penicillin was the first antibiotic used to fight the disease. In 1978 the first

Unknown bacteria determined to be Alcaligenes faecalis because of its morphological, physiological and metabolic properties.

The principal treatment was isolation. Patients were taken from their homes and isolated in special fever hospitals for up to six weeks. This allowed time for their own immune system to fight off the infection and limited the risk of contamination between patients and

This particular bacterium is not one that inhabits a specific geographical region as it colonizes within the human body. The disease is

Summer Wilks, who was 88-years of age, died a horrifying death in 2012 as her left lung gradually filled with liquid that should have been streaming into her stomach. Over the time of 12 hours, while Ms. Wilks was cognizant and limited in her bed, her lung was being filled with liquid, which caused her to gradually drown. The patient was given a feeding tube since she experienced dementia and had no gag reflex or capacity to swallow sustenance. Ms. Wilks had been transported from a nursing home to Phoebe Memorial Hospital for successive blacking out scenes. Once in the hospital she was given a feeding tube, which she pulled out. In the wake of restraining her, doctors re-supplanted the feeding tube and checked with a x-ray that it had been improperly set, so a third tube was embedded into what the doctor believed was Ms. Wilks stomach. The placement was checked once again utilizing an x-ray, which was misread by the specialist. As opposed to being inserted into her stomach, the

There are different places that this bacterium can be obtained. “More than three million C. difficile infections occur in hospitals in the US each year” (Lee, 2013, p.2). Other known ways that you can contract this bacterium is nursing homes or surfaces in which you can touch and digest the bacteria. It can be transferred from people that are already infected with the bacteria and have not washed their hands they touch a surface or object and the bacterium is than transferred. If the bacteria is not killed or contained it can grow stronger allowing it to mutate and become harder to control and get rid of. Most people that get C.diff once are more likely to become infected again.

They generally take place in healthcare premises, because of the gathering of extremely susceptible sufferers, widespread usage of aggressive measures, and great proportions of the use of antibiotics in this environment. Approximately, twenty lac US citizens develop Healthcare-associated infections per year, causing ninety-nine thousand demises, most because of pathogens resistant to antibiotics (Rossolini et al., 2014). In 2006, two general healthcare-associated infections (pneumonia and sepsis) were discovered to be liable for the demises of approximately fifty thousand US citizens and cost the US healthcare system above $800 million (Ventola,

If the immune system is unable to stop the infection, the bacterium will multiply and then spread to the bloodstream, after which the first signs of disease are observed in the form of fever. The bacterium penetrates further into the bone marrow, liver, and bile ducts, from which bacteria are excreted into the bowel movements. (Easmon 2003)

When first line and the second line antimicrobial treatment options are limited by resistance health care providers are forced to use antibiotics that may be more toxic to the patient frequently more expensive and less effective. Many forms of AMR spread with remarkable speed. World health leaders have described AMR as “Nightmare Bacteria” that pose “Catastrophic threat” to people in every country in the world

Microscopic single-celled organisms, such as bacteria, consist of a seemingly simple internal structure that lacks membrane-bound organelles, yet bacteria thrive in diverse nutritional environments. The significant ability of bacteria to adapt to a wide variety of nutritional environments reflects their use of overlapping regulatory systems that link gene expression to intracellular accumulation of a small number of key metabolites. Bacteria survive using a diverse array of carbon sources, especially if its main carbon source is absent in their natural environment. Bacteria have carbon components that we know are required for energy production but how does the transport of carbon sources, which is in turn utilized in the central metabolic pathway connected to gene regulation? The central metabolic pathways are those pathways that provide the precursor metabolites to all the other pathways for the synthesis of macromolecules such as DNA, RNA, and proteins.