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Thursday, October 31, 2013

Tuesday, October 29, 2013

Tuesday, October 22, 2013

Super Gonorrhea: A New AIDS


BE CAREFUL! Wrap it up folks!



'Super gonorrhea' and other antibiotic-resistant bugs deemed urgent threat by CDC

Antibiotic-resistant infections including 'super gonorrhea' and 'nightmare bacteria' kill at least 23,000 people in the U.S. each year, according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Overprescribing of antibiotics was named as a chief cause.







A team of researchers has discovered a strain of gonorrhea like the one pictured above that may be resistant to antibiotics.

JAMIE GRILL




A strain of gonorrhea (above) is one of several infections that can't be treated by current drugs, CDC officials said.

Antibiotic-resistant gonorrhea, a diarrhea-causing superbug and a class of fast-growing killer bacteria dubbed a "nightmare" were classified as urgent public-health threats in the United States on Monday.

According to a new report by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), at least 2 million people in the United States develop serious bacterial infections that are resistant to one or more types of antibiotics each year, and at least 23,000 die from the infections.

"For organism after organism, we're seeing this steady increase in resistance rates," Dr Thomas Frieden, director of the CDC, said in a telephone interview. "We don't have new drugs about to come out of the pipeline. If and when we get new drugs, unless we do a better job of protecting them, we'll lose those, also."
RELATED: LOOK OUT, NORTH AMERICA: 'SUPER GONORRHEA' IS COMING

Overprescribing of antibiotics is a chief cause of antibiotic resistance, affording pathogens the opportunity to outwit the drugs used to treat them. Only a handful of new antibiotics have been developed and brought to market in the past few decades, and only a few companies are working on drugs to replace them.

In addition to resistant gonorrhea, the others now seen as urgent threats, according to the first-of-its-kind report released on Monday, are C. difficile and the killer class known as carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae, or CRE.

The report was conceived to bring together as much information as possible about drug-resistant superbugs and how to slow their spread, with a hope of preserving the remaining drugs that still work, Frieden said.

ANTIBIOTIC RESISTANT SUPERBUGS POSE ‘CATASTROPHIC THREAT’: UK HEALTH OFFICIAL

The United States is not alone in raising the alarm over antibiotic drug resistance. Last March the chief medical officer for England said antibiotic resistance poses a "catastrophic health threat". That followed a report last year from the World Health Organization that found a "superbug" strain of gonorrhea had spread to several European countries.

The CDC report ranks the threat of drug-resistant superbugs into three categories - urgent, severe and concerning - based on factors such as their health and economic impacts, the total number of cases, the ease with which they are transmitted and the availability of effective antibiotics.

Among the top three threats deemed "urgent" is CRE, which Frieden last March called a "nightmare bacteria" because even the strongest antibiotics are not effective against it.

GENE SLEUTHS TRACK SPREAD OF SUPERBUG

According to the report, CRE accounts for 9,300 healthcare-associated infections. The two most common types of CRE - carbapenem-resistant Klebsiella spp. and carbapenem-resistant E. coli - account for some 600 deaths each year.

"For CRE, we're seeing increases from 1 state to 38 states in the last decade," Frieden said.

C. difficile, the most common hospital-based infection in the United States, made the list of urgent threats both because it has begun to resist antibiotics and because it preys on the overuse of antibiotics.

HOW GENE RESEARCH STOPPED A KILLER SUPERBUG

C. difficile, which causes life-threatening diarrhea, spreads from person to person on contaminated equipment and on the hands of healthcare workers and visitors. It is especially stubborn in hospitals because of the widespread use of antibiotics, which kill protective bacteria in the gut for months, allowing invaders such as C. difficile to flourish.

According to the report, C. difficile causes 250,000 infections and kills 14,000 people in the United States each year, adding $1 billion annually in excess medical costs. Deaths from C. difficile rose 400 percent from 2000 to 2007 due to the emergence of a drug-resistant strain of the bacteria.

The third "urgent" threat in the report is drug-resistant Neisseria gonorrhoeae, which causes 246,000 U.S. cases of the sexually transmitted disease gonorrhea each year. Gonorrhea is increasingly becoming resistant to tetracycline, cefixime, ceftriaxone and azithromycin - formerly the most successful treatments for the disease.
‘SUPER’ GONORRHEA SWEEPING THE GLOBE, HEALTH EXPERTS WARN

Gonorrhea is especially troublesome because it is easily spread, and infections are easily missed. In the United States, there are approximately 300,000 reported cases, but because infected people often have no symptoms the CDC estimates the actual number of cases is closer to 820,000.

If left untreated, gonorrhea can lead to pelvic inflammatory disease, ectopic pregnancy, stillbirths, severe eye infections in babies and infertility in men and women.

"The three organisms that have been chosen as urgent are all increasing at an alarming rate to which therapies are limited," said Dr Edward Septimus, an infectious disease expert at HCA Healthcare System in Houston, Texas, and a member of the Infectious Diseases Society of America's Antimicrobial Resistance Workgroup.

Septimus, who was not involved with the CDC report, said the pathogens in the urgent and serious categories - which include Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, and drug-resistant tuberculosis - are "certainly worthy of immediate response. I do believe it's a looming public-health crisis," he said.

In addition to ranking the threat of superbugs, the report outlines a four-point plan to help fight the spread of antibiotic resistance.

Not surprisingly, it underscores the need for new antibiotics, citing ever-slowing development efforts by pharmaceutical companies due to the high cost of such programs and relatively low profit margins of the drugs.

It also stresses the need for hospitals to prevent infections from occurring and to contain the spread of resistant infections; carefully tracking the spread of resistant bacteria; and ensuring that antibiotics are prescribed only to patients who need them.

"It's not too late," Frieden said. "There are things we can do that can stop the spread of drug resistance. We need to scale up the implementation of those strategies."
Source

Friday, October 18, 2013

Forever Never Part II: Fuck you Disney..


Artist Shows What Disney Princesses’ Happily-Ever-Afters Really Look Like




The one thing you could be sure about in childhood was that every fairy tale would end with a “happily ever after”. But what if we were to continue on with what happened to the beautiful princesses after we closed the last book page? Photographer Dina Goldstein imagines what lives of the Disney princesses turned out to be if we left all the fairy tale luck and charm aside. “I began to imagine Disney’s perfect Princesses juxtaposed with real issues that were affecting women around me, such as illness, addiction and self-image issues,” says Dina. “With limited funds, I began to assemble my series.” The Fallen Princesses series also comes in a book!

























The Moral of the story?


The expectations Disney sets for a young girl's life are misleading and horribly unrealistic.

Stop that shit already Disney!

PS.. the Princess Jasmine pic is racist!! Everyone in the Middle East isn't some gun toting Jihadist. I digress though..


Linkage

Thursday, October 17, 2013

Women Shrinking



In this stirring piece, Lily Myers captures the differences in what women and men are taught about themselves and their approach to life, specifically those in her family. She truly highlights why its is important to teach our daughters to be proud, bold and not shrink, because this is what we also teach our boys.

"Women shrinking, making space for the entrance of men in their lives.."

"You have been taught to grow out, I have been taught to grow in.." 

"I have been taught..


ACCOMMODATION."

This piece is excellent.





Lily Myers, "Shrinking Women"

Tuesday, October 15, 2013

Bro Rape



Ok. I realize rape is not a funny topic. In light of recent confessions by Chris Brown of being raped as a child, and even on the heels of Corey Feldman admitting he set his late best friend Corey Haim up with child-sexing male predators..

I still found this funny.

Raping of men is not funny, but I thought Donald Glovers acting was hilarious.

I take comfort in knowing that will all of the sexual violations of men, women and children around the globe,

THIS PIECE IS FICTION.

Men, do you find this funny or are you too homophobic to even watch it?

Let me know.

And now our feature presentation..



Wednesday, October 2, 2013

Body Image Advertising: Men Don't Like It Either..

Womens' self-esteems are under attack daily. Magazines, music videos, celebrities and famous people alike, all conveying messages of "if you don't look perfect like me, something is wrong with you.."

This mentality is an advertisers DREAM, because too many people fall for said illusion and spend big money attempting to fit in and be perfect looking. Every once and a while however, some sheep do wake up. They do see the images of perfection as the unrealistic projections that they are, and are able to detach and just be ordinary.

Which unlike airbrushing, is normal. 

Women are often targeted because as we women know, our value is often judged by our looks. In this photo series, a group of MEN are showing everyone how unrealistic male underwear ads are, and how the "average guy" would look in the same scenarios.

It's no fun to be sublimally bullied because you don't fit the contrived image of what beauty is supposed to be. It's nice to know that men, ever the oglers themselves, don't like to be painted as asthetic underachievers either.

Just let us live. As we are. 

Photoshop was not created by Maybelline so um... #fuckoff


Funny Photo Series Shows How Ordinary Men Would Look In Underwear Ads











Dolce & Gabbana


There has been a lot of criticism directed at underwear ads as many of them feature women with perfect bodies. A lesser known problem is that men can feel just as insecure about their bodies.


To highlight this problem, Jenny Francis and The Sun have created underwear poster ads that show how ordinary men look like in them.

From Armani to H&M, these side-by-side comparisons reveal how the media has distorted our perception of how male bodies should be like.

View this thought-provoking series below.


H&M 


Armani 


Calvin Klein 



Way to go men. Be the regular, out of shape, non-tattooed, non-hunks that you are. 
Being comfortable in your skin is sexier than you may ever realize. Muah!
-WTS.

Tuesday, October 1, 2013

When Ass Kissing Is OK..



It's acceptable to kiss ass if..





it's rainbow sprinkled.









I can't think of any other times..


Can you?