09.27.2012 – GOLLYGEE!

The New Yorker magazine reports this month on the appearance of drug resistant gonorrhea. The trend is worrisome to the medical community. Even though the body can usually get rid of the infection without antibiotics, most times it can’t do so before it wreaks havoc and leaves damage. The abstract is below. Click here for the article (requires subscription).

ABSTRACT: MEDICAL DISPATCHES about the rise of drug-resistant gonorrhea. In January, 2009, a prostitute visited a clinic in Kyoto, Japan, for a routine checkup. Her lab test came back positive for gonorrhea. She was given several doses of ceftriaxone, the definitive treatment for gonorrhea, over a period of time, but her condition persisted. Now, public-health experts view the Kyoto case as something far more alarming: the emergence of a strain of gonorrhea that is resistant to the last drug available against it, and the harbinger of a sexually transmitted global epidemic. Gonorrhea is the second most commonly reported infectious disease in the U.S. Only one class of drugs, called cephalosporins—cefixime and ceftriaxone—is known to reliably treat it, and for several years resistance to cefixime has been rising. Some public-health officials predict that in five to eight years the superbug will be widespread. In the U.S., gonorrhea in general is linked to poverty and youth. Scientists have made little progress in developing a vaccine that would protect against a gonococcus infection. The primary hope for stemming the expected epidemic of resistant gonorrhea lies in persuading people to alter their behavior. Mentions Boston Medical Center and the walk-in clinic at Fenway Health, in Boston.

Robert Krulwich reports over at NPR:

Science writer David Blatner, in his new book Spectrums, says a group of researchers at the University of Hawaii, being well-versed in all things beachy, tried to calculate the number of grains of sand.

They said, if you assume a grain of sand has an average size and you calculate how many grains are in a teaspoon and then multiply by all the beaches and deserts in the world, the Earth has roughly (and we’re speaking very roughly here) 7.5 x 10¹⁸grains of sand, or seven quintillion, five hundred quadrillion grains.

That’s a lot of grains.

OK, so how about stars? Well, to my amazement, it turns out that when you look up, even on a clear and starry night, you won’t see very many stars. Blatner says the number is a low, low “several thousand,” which gives the sand grain folks a landslide victory. But we’re not limiting ourselves to what an ordinary stargazer can see.

Our stargazer gets a Hubble telescope and a calculator, so now we can count distant galaxies, faint stars, red dwarfs, everything we’ve ever recorded in the sky, and boom! Now the population of stars jumps enormously, to 70 thousand million, million, million stars in the observable universe (a 2003 estimate), so that we’ve got multiple stars for every grain of sand — which means, sorry, grains, you are nowhere near as numerous as the stars.

GOLLYGEE!

Date: 09.27.2012

resitant gonorrhea

how many grains of sand? how many stars?