Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by eth0up 508 days ago
Resistance. It's not quite the end of the world if TB becomes impervious to, say, catnip or whatever, which isn't front line medicine. And some options might have a more mechanical rather than biological mechanism/function.

Compliance for a 6 month course of just about anything is difficult and more so for something that may seem asymptomatic. Oozing sores, foul oders and overt discomfort would probably help, but alas...
1 comments
Eisenstein 507 days ago
I'm sorry but this doesn't make sense. Antibiotic resistance to TB only affects those who have TB, so if another 'natural' medicine is found and TB gets resistant to it, then it is still just as bad for the people affected.

Natural means nothing in this context. Effective medicine is effective medicine, and there is nothing that makes TB less prone to developing a resistance to a 'natural' effective medicine over any other effective medicine.

link
eth0up 507 days ago
I admit I slipped into the octogon of HN where animals weak and strong come to test their teeth on impulse. Therefore I must be prepared to write essays on semantics even when I use subtle indicators such as quotes.

For the first portion of your reply, I think that if TB became resistant to potatoes with licorice icecream, it would be preferable to having absolutely no recourse with antibiotics. But that's silly. If you are 100% certain that latent TB is innocuous and can't be reactivated, I must admit my logic was flawed.

Edit: is not, eg mrsa, becoming resistant to various things in the environment? Biofilms make many bacteria resistant to even alcohol. Staph, ubiquitous and thus exposed to pretty much anything a person's skin is exposed to is probably resistant to many things it previously wasn't. But it remains vulnerable to a few antibiotics, for now.

link
Eisenstein 507 days ago
I understand now what you mean. The thing is that TB doesn't transfer its resistance to other pathogens like MRSA does. It develops resistance via a different mechanism (mutations of its genome) then MRSA does (horizontal gene transfer).

Thus, you have a misconception about the nature of TB resistance. This accounts for the pushback. People tend to forget that we all have different knowledge bases and we talk past each other.

link