Forget Israel and Palestine. Because there is now a gun pointed at the head of every man, woman and child on the planet. It’s called Clostridium difficile. The clue is in the second part of the name, because according to this chilling sentence the admirable Nicola Davis of the Guardian[1]
Liquid bleach does not kill off a hospital superbug that can cause fatal infections, researchers have found.
Think about that very carefully indeed. Since the age of Pasteur and Semmelweiss, the way we have worked things has been pretty clever. Any bacterium, resistant or not, must first get through a wall of sterilisation and cleanliness before it can reach a human body. And that wall is made up pretty largely of disinfectants like bleaches. If the wall fails an almost infinite number of bacteria will be on us, multiplying fast. Which will give them correspondingly huge opportunities to evolve new forms of resistance. It is unlikely that our present group of antibiotics could hold the line for more than a year or two. After which the mass dying starts. After all if C. difficile can do it, why not every other bacterium? [2] And even the odd fungus?
We frankly admit that we were not expecting this, gentle readers. Around the offices and workshops of LSS, hygiene and cleanliness rules are pretty tight, to say the least. Howard Hughes would have loved it in our little corner of Croydon.. To think it’s all in vain is a bit, well, disconcerting, to say the least. But we take comfort on behalf of all those exobiologists investigating the possibilities of life in Outer Space. It shows that organisms will evolve to surpass any conceivable obstacle, if they get the chance. So that particular research community now has something to cheer. For the time being.
[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clostridioides_difficile_infection
#bleach #disinfectant #hygiene #cleaning #antibiotic resistance #pandemic #clostridium difficile
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