About five years ago, I had a bed-bug scare due to an old “Pantera Live” VCR that an old punk gifted me. (Read that story HERE.) When the bed-bug man came over to blast my place with “heat treatment”, he told me that chemicals no longer work. Bed bugs, he said, were becoming immune to the chemicals once used to take their disgusting, bloodsucking lives away. Instead of chemicals, this guy used heat to exterminate. Bed bugs can’t survive over a certain temperature, so you basically just boil your apartment and the bugs along with it.
“Soon, they’ll be immune to that!” He told me as he unloaded his equipment. I shuddered. Have you ever had a bed-bug scare? For weeks, I was a c—t hair away from an anxiety induced psychosis.
Did you hear? Urinary tract infections are the new bed bugs! Allow me to explain…
Have you ever have a UTI? If you have, you understand the pain. When you pee, it feels like tiny, serrated razor blades are flowing out with your urine, slicing and scratching. Even worse, you feel like you have to go every 20 seconds, but then, when you sit down on the toilet, nothing comes out but an empty ache. You never want to stand up straight because your guts are so sore. It’s uncomfortable, painful, awful and, if not treated, the infection can spread into your kidneys or bloodstream resulting in severe illness. Over half of all women will suffer from a UTI in their lifetime, and usually this can be treated with drugs. Now, the antibiotics that usually fix the problem are on the fritz.
According to a PBS report, E. Coli is the leading cause of UTIs, and this little fucker is becoming immune to the antibiotics doctors use to treat the infection. When a UTI is extremely dire, intravenous injections of the antibiotic colistin are used. PBS notes that there is an emerging resistance to colistin in India and China, probably because “farmers are using the drugs as a growth promotor in livestock.”
“Flies at poultry farms in China were loaded with bacteria containing genes for antibiotic resistance, the team discovered. The same team also found E. coli containing mcr-1 – a gene that imparts resistance to colistin, an antibiotic of last resort – in one per cent of hospital patients in two of China’s large cities, neither of which have a history of using colistin to treat humans. They also discovered in the hospitals genes that offer resistance to carbapenems, another class of last-resort antibiotics.”
Let me break it down: fly carries bacteria from the country cow to the city girl, where it’s then passed amongst more and more humans.
The World Health Organization is working on it. This organization, made up of the world’s 20 richest countries, will discuss paying pharmaceutical companies a handsome sum to persuade them to invest in an otherwise unprofitable new antibiotic. It’s nice to know that no one cares about E.Coli immunity; meanwhile, according to American newsweekly US News, the assholes creating fentanyl over at Insys Therapeutics are busy toiling away on a synthetic form of THC to stop the legalization of cannabis.
Chances are that if you are a woman reading this you have had what is called a “functioning UTI”, which means that it is treatable by the antibiotics. However, when the antibiotics fail, and the infection makes its way through the body, it can become fatal. UTIs that are resistant to one or more types of antibiotic are becoming more and more common.
Although we may not be at risk here in Canada, children in the developing countries are. According to a research paper published by WHO, it’s a growing problem.
When my little sister was just a kid she got really bad UTIs. I remember her being five years old and crying on the toilet. It was hard to explain it to her then, but truly scary to be explaining it now.
• You can email Mish your sex questions and queries to [email protected]
