Which was actually a sort of joke I had with some friends as a teenager as we shared the potato chips out of the bag. But, I guess we were just advanced for our age:
Only Two Things Scare Me:
And one of them is antibiotic resistance. Along with my regular co-author, Bill Sage, I’ve just sent off a new article to the law reviews, titled Combating Antimicrobial Resistance: Regulatory Strategies and Institutional Capacity.
Antibiotic resistance is a major public health problem. Every year, two million Americans acquire bacterial infections in the hospital, and 70% of those infections are resistant to at least one antibiotic. MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staph aureus) has attracted the most media attention: the CDC estimated that MRSA caused 94,000 life-threatening infections, and 18,650 deaths in 2005.
Congress and many states are currently debating legislation to reduce antibiotic resistance. The article blends regulatory theory and comparative institutional analysis to explain how we can use regulation to lower the risk of antibiotic-resistant bacterial infection, rationalize the use of existing antibiotics, and encourage innovation. We canvass the full range of regulatory options that are available, and explain the compatibility or incompatibility of particular regulatory strategies with existing legal and regulatory systems.
Or, alternately we can stop being afraid of dirt. Stop using anti-bacterial soaps. Stop fretting that if our kitchen counter isn’t surgically sterile that we’ll catch salmonella. This is not an argument in favor of wallowing in filth and, truth be told, I’m a bit obsessive-compulsive about having clean hands…but methinks we go too far in our worries about dirt.
The first I heard of this sort of thing was back as a child when the word came out – from official sources, as far as I could tell – that we shouldn’t stuff the turkey at Thanksgiving. Seems that there was this one in a zillion chance that you’d get food poisoning….of course, you also had to be an idiot and not clean the turkey properly and not cook it thoroughly, but that was besides the point. From that point on, no stuffing in the turkey…people who wished to each out and have stuffing with their turkey were forced to consume dry, tasteless bread-gunk cooked outside the bird. Its only gotten worse since then.
Live a little, people – keep clean, but remember that we have bacteria in our own intestines and couldn’t live without them. We’re not meant to be perfectly clean in the physical sense…and if we tolerate a little dirt, we’ll find that when we’ve actually got a real infection, we’re not infected with resistant bugs.
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