jrabone
Joined 15 years ago
Karma
1,103
Submissions
456
Member since
Oct 27
Recent submissions
Comment · 12 years ago
Comment · 12 years ago
No, it's standard UK practice, especially for the first 2 years after splenectomy. It does seem to vary around the world though.
Comment · 12 years ago
For hopefully the last time, I'm not talking about the bacteria in the product. All human beings defecate. Many (most?) clean themselves afterwards with their hands. If you do not practise adequate hygiene with a surfactant-based cleanser, those faecal bacteria are still stuck to the skin afterwards and transfer to anything you touch, where they may be picked up by someone else who is not in a position to deal with them. This is not an appeal to emotion, it is a fact which I happen to have had personal experience of.
Comment · 12 years ago
We provide them a home, and in return they protect and clean us. They don't want to destroy their home, they would die, too.
Sorry but that is absolute, unmitigated rubbish. I spent 2 weeks in intensive care, with a surgical scar from my sternum to my groin which de-hisced (burst open) because my own bacteria tried to kill me.
While they might be symbiotic in the right place (eg. the gut), they'll kill you pretty quickly if they get out.
Comment · 12 years ago
Not talking about the bacteria in the product, I'm talking about the faecal bacteria (your own personal gut microbes) that are still stuck to the skin afterwards due to not using a surfactant-based washing product. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7785997 further down the thread.
Comment · 12 years ago
Soap and water is very good at removing faecal contamination. In the absence of small children and pets, and the taking of a prophylactic dose of antibiotics daily, my main concern is whether the people I share work and living space with are spreading their own faeces over surfaces I interact with. If their cleansing regime is as effective as soap and hot water, all is well.
Comment · 12 years ago
TFA doesn't contain enough detail about hand-washing as opposed to body & hair, in much the same way that most people don't like talking about wiping their backsides vs washing them after defecating.
Comment · 12 years ago
Thank you (I'm not religious either). I'm sorry you feel uncomfortable, that's not my intent at all. In purely objective terms, there's obviously a benefit to culling the weak.
I wouldn't necessarily advocate for _increased_ use of soap and shampoo (and certainly not for antibiotics). I also believe there is an argument that partial disinfection is much worse than nothing, when viewed in terms of selection pressure on a microbial population, and I don't think daily use of antibiotic soap is a good idea (although Triclosan is actually pretty useless anyway).
However, I definitely don't think we should be encouraging _less_ hygiene, even though I'm obviously biased.
Comment · 12 years ago
I can't reply directly to "rosser" due to max comment depth, but fecal transplants don't generally involve introducing gut bacteria to anywhere other than the gut.
Comment · 12 years ago
Your fecal coliforms will kill other people, simply because they're yours, not theirs. They'll kill you if they don't stay in the gut (mine tried, along with a carbapenem-resistant strain of streptococcus introduced via a central line).
Comment · 12 years ago
I'm still alive, that's as far as it goes. 30% + chance of recurrence and it's not like I can have those organs removed a second time. However, it's an improvement on the initial diagnosis which was stage 4 adenocarcinoma with peritoneal metastasis (ie. a Kaplan-Meyer survival of about 5 years max).
It's not just immuno-suppressed people, it's everyone, and a risk/benefit comparison with peanut allergies is spurious. If everyone smeared themselves in peanut butter before they left the house each morning, you'd have a closer comparison.
Plenty of studies at http://www.cdc.gov/handwashing/publications-data-stats.html - click on "Improved Health".
Comment · 12 years ago
So anybody who happens to have a compromised immune system gets to fight your personalised microbes, perhaps fatally? How very ... Darwinian ... of you.
Soap and water have saved more lives than any medication, ever. I now have no spleen (6 months ago I lost spleen, gallbladder and half my stomach as well as sundry peritoneal membranes to cancer) and nearly died as a result of post-operative infections. I take daily antibiotics, possibly forever. As a society, we don't just cleanse ourselves for our own well-being, we wash for others.
Comment · 12 years ago
Yep. I run Privoxy and a DNS resolver configured to be authoritative for the worst 5000 or so ad farms. Zips along nicely, and works for every machine on the LAN or via remote VPN.
Fuck ads. Find a different business model.
Comment · 12 years ago
It's UTF-8 being interpreted as raw bytes: "a-hat" is the 0x80 marker byte. A common fail is forgetting that Microsoft Word auto-corrects straight quotes (which are in ASCII) to curly double quotes (which need Unicode), and serving the resulting text as CP1252 or ASCII or some such.
UTF-8 / GMT / ISO8601 people. It's (should be) law.
Not to a significant extent. In cases where people are exposed to other people's bacteria in quantity, they generally become (mildy) ill quite quickly while developing immunity - see fresher's flu etc.
If you had read the article, you would know that they're supplementing personal flora with Nitrosomonas eutropha.
And HOPING that N.Eutropha will out-compete their dangerous-to-others bacteria.
And hurting all of us just to help you, denying us the necessary and amazing flora that makes our lives possible, is selfish and Darwinian in it's own way.
I'm not suggesting you shower in bleach, just that you wash yourself with something more effective than fairy dust.