Friday, May 13, 2011

A Spoon full of Sugar....

Antibiotics are far more effective if taken with sugar, new study from the journal Nature says. However,  they want you to pay them to read it, so here's a few that have the same information for free. These are not as detailed as the nature article, but a lot easier to read.


MSNBC
Discover
Science Daily
Common Health
Io9





Seems like a lot of bacteria have "sleepers" that sit there and don't do anything... these are called "Persistors". they let the antibiotics come in and kill all their buddies, then pop up and breed like crazy again. Persistors have gotten pretty good at waiting till the medicine has run its course, then reinfecting the host with a new strain, more resistant to what killed the old strain.

We've been losing the war against bacteria due to this little trick. It's why staph infections are so nasty, along with a hell of a lot of other infectious bacteria.

Sugar changes the rules. Apparently it's waking up ALL the Persistors and having them active while the first run of antibiotics do their thing. No more bacteria taking notes and learning what killed the first batch, because they are ALL in the first batch, enjoying the sugar, never noticing that the medicine has closed and locked the door.. 

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