<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by pat:

Wyldflower, they're making me wear gloves and a mask for opening mail here at work. I think the chances of something arriving in our mail is less than miniscule, but it's the new rule.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Gloves were suggested, and I'm ordering some... masks were not mentioned, but I guess I'll order those too... they will be here when I return from FLYING to and from Europe!

I ain't letting them stop me!!!

Well, the mail arrived and the mail carrier is wearing latex gloves. She said that everything goes through all the same machines and everything so it's just sensible to take a few precautions. She also says her family makes her shower as soon as she comes home and tells her not to touch anything until she's done that. That might be overdoing it a little. I hope.

pat and wyld..i'm glad you're wearing the gloves and masks...especially the masks as the inhaled is the absolute worst. all of this sucks, but as pat said..each individual is probably not in that much risk. if you think about how much greater your chances are to be killed in a car accident...yet, you don't stop driving. perspective...and the fear of a new danger is always worse than a danger you've come to accept as an accepted risk. i truly hope they find out if these incidents are connected, and if so, where they're coming from.

Oh, yeah. It's definitely a matter of getting used to it. As individuals, we're probably in more danger every day of just dropping dead from some natural cause, let alone driving, which is insane if you really stop to think about it. But of course, you don't usually. You just do it. We'll just assimilate any new risks and whatever precautions we need to take and go on with our lives, I'm sure. Not that it doesn't suck, but it sucks that it's scary to just drive the mile back and forth to work here, too, and that has nothing to do with terrorism.

True, true, and another true. The biggest part of a bio-logical problem, is people taking Cypro without the need. Every hypocondriac in America is probly now in possession of the anti-biotic. Taking any anti-biotic without GREAT cause is a health risk alone.

*It's a tuff science, and I don't quite understand it. The therory however is simple to understand. If you take it when you are not sick, there's a good chance it WON'T help you when you are. The therory goes on, that in evalution, likey most, if not all of these medicines will be rendered use-less.

it's a trifle scary! But it's nothing I didn't know before 9/11. What I didn't know, was I would see it happen in my life time.

that's exactly true, rb! taking any antibiotic when you don't need it, or even when you do, decreases it's ability to work later. it's why they have to keep coming up with new and stronger ones, and why you should take the lowest strength of one that you need that will still work. the bacteria that they are fighting are amazingly good at morphing into new strains when they're "attacked" with antibiotics. not only that, but using cipro when you don't have anthrax exposure is just stupid...it's not a preventive medicine. what i would like to see them do, and i understand they are working on it, is devising a way to come up with smallpox vacinations again. i understand they are trying to dilute what they now have in stock and testing it on a few people to see if the telltale scab still shows up. apparently, they are pretty sure they can dilute it to about one-tenth of it's strength and it will almost always work. (i think there were some limited tests before) that could greatly expand the amount of doses on hand. smallpox would be far worse than the anthrax because it's so highly contagious, even though it's not always fatal.

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by rbrown:


*It's a tuff science, and I don't quite understand it. The therory however is simple to understand. If you take it when you are not sick, there's a good chance it WON'T help you when you are. The therory goes on, that in evalution, likey most, if not all of these medicines will be rendered use-less.

<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

If antibiotics are taken improperly (when not indicated, or not a complete course taken when it is indicated) then the bacteria which are exposed to the antibiotic, and which survive that exposure, are likely to be resistant to that antibiotic... (that which does not kill me will make me stronger!) You get a bunch of bacteria that are resistant to a certain antibiotic, that antibiotic is no longer effective in curing the disease...

You get enough people taking Cipro without good reason, then Cipro is likely to become ineffective in fighting all sorts of bacterial infections, not just the Anthrax... so we have an even bigger problem... This has happened with certain other bacteria, such as Tuberculosis... there are strains that are called "MDR" (or multiple-drug resistant) TB

I'm not taking meds unless I really need them! - Hey Deb.. GMTA!

<center><FONT COLOR="#000080">--- Edited 1 times, lastly by Wyldflower on Oct 16, 2001 ---</FONT></center>

An interesting aside - I've recently read somewhere (I don't recall where) that the latest research is showing that although bacteria do become drug-resistant, once the drug to which they have become resistant is not present for a while, the bacteria ends up becoming resistant to that drug again. I don't remember what kind of time-frame they talked about for the bacteria to revert back to the weaker form was though.

Of course, that's still no excuse for using anti-biotics when they aren't really needed. The good news is that over time, you can probably cycle through different drugs, dropping one as the bacteria become resistant and using a new one instead, and over time you'll probably be able to go back to ones that had quit working - so the idea of a "super-bacteria" that is resistant to every drug we have is not really one we need to worry about. The bad news is...if you overuse them, you may limit yourself on what you can use in the short term, and may be unable to use the one you need (or it will be ineffective) when you need it most.

when did they stop giving small pox vaccines? since woodstock, right? maybe since disco?

i think 1972, star, but i'm not positive. around that time.. since it only stays effective for a limited time, those of us that still have the scar probably are not protected. i read somewhere that maybe the effective span of time is 20 years...if i remember correctly.

I can't tell you how much that pisses me off. 1972 is right according to something I just read, and that goes with my memory of my older kid getting it and my younger one not getting it. I never thought they should stop giving it. Around when the word parent became a verb a bunch of people started to object to it, because of the tiny risk involved in the vaccine. As much as that's understandable, if an organism existed once, it could exist again. And we hadn't even thought of bio-terrorism. It just seemed totally illogical to ever think you'd beaten mother nature like that.

i agree with you completely, pat. even if they had continued to give it, while allowing those parents that objected to refrain it would have been better than the whole country being vulnerable. that's the way they handled the dpt shots...a miniscule number of kids didn't get them, but with almost everyone being vacinated, you still head off a major epidemic! i think i remember reading the chance of a serious side effect was 1 in a million with the smallpox vacination. seems to me those aren't bad odds in comparison with what could happen if smallpox is reintroduced into civilization.

yikes. i didn't know it had been 20 years since they stopped (almost) and i didn't know the vaccine could become inert, or whatever they become. wow.

i agree, i thought the same as you guys, at the time... as long as there was any on earth (and there was...) it seemed stupid to stop vaccinating.

Unless something has changed, or the US government has been lying, there are exactly two smallpox cultures left in the world. The organism is extinct in the wild.

The cultures are heavily guarded, though as we've found out that doesn't always mean much.

I'm glad I'm up here at Arrowhead this week, watching the trees turn. CNN looks and feels vaguely out of place, and the baseball is way more popular.

-Z

I surely hope you're right, ZoWie. That would make it a lot less likely that we've got something to worry about as far as that particular disease is concerned. So..why all the talk about it, then?