Flesh eating bacteria?

[Jim Logios]

Wow!  Just saw this.  Kind of scary that a girl contracted flesh eating bacteria from a fish tank...

 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/21/hannele-cox-flesh-eating-f...

 

Sorry if this has been previously posted. 

[Chris McMahon]

I prescribe wheat grass juice and juicing a lot of veggies. It may take weeks of juicing to get rid of that. She needs micronutrients to combat the microbacteria. She could even put the wheat grass juice directly on the rash. I am sure the doctors will prescribe synthetic drugs that won't work.

I am not a doctor so you can take or leave my advice.

[Jim Logios]

I'm sure there's a multitude of herbs that can be topically applied that would neutralize the bacteria. Medical grade honey and colloidal silver are another option...

[Chris McMahon]

If you use too much colloidal silver you can turn your skin blue. It also won't go back to normal skin color as far as I know.

[TCLynx]

Sounds like her particular infection has gone a bit deeper than just a rash or granuloma seeing as she has been suffering from it for 5 years now and it is eating the bone and has curtailed her activities.  Most people don't have quite that reaction from that type of bacteria.

[Jim Logios]

It's called argyria...  Supposedly, it only happens if one drinks copious amounts of colloidal silver.  Also, it only occurs when the c/s is improperly made with the molecules being too large to be absorbed properly.

I would use it topically in this case...

 

Chris McMahon said:

If you use too much colloidal silver you can turn your skin blue. It also won't go back to normal skin color as far as I know.

[Jim Logios]

Thankfully, it's a RARE bacteria.  I guess this bacteria can coexist in the nitrifying bacteria?

hmm... this is a new one on me...

TCLynx said:

Sounds like her particular infection has gone a bit deeper than just a rash or granuloma seeing as she has been suffering from it for 5 years now and it is eating the bone and has curtailed her activities.  Most people don't have quite that reaction from that type of bacteria.

[TCLynx]

The bacteria isn't all that rare itself.  Different forms of it exist in freshwater and marine environments.  It is just rare that people get infected with it though not unheard of.  Most people who catch it are occupationally exposed to water and it usually infects pre-existing injuries.  It is rare that it becomes a really hard to combat flesh eating 5 year antibiotic resistant illness.

 

I have the impression that salt water aquarium keeping may be a bit more dangerous that freshwater to these sorts of illness but I'm mainly basing that on some of the gloves I've seen for sale for working with reef tanks (add to that the fact that they are also using nets and tongs rather than their hands along with those gloves.)

 

As to coexisting with the nitrifying bacteria, there is nothing that the nitrifying bacteria does that would inhibit other bacteria from existing in a system.  Actually we depend on lots of other bacteria for our systems to work really.  Heterotrophic bacteria is very important to the solids break down in AP system (this is what the worms actually eat and not so much the solids themselves, worms slurp up the bacteria up that have been breaking down the solids.)  We can hope that all the great beneficial bacteria will create enough diversity and out compete the bad ones but this is more  a situation of keeping the numbers of bad bacteria low enough not to be a major hazard rather than killing them all completely.  Truth is a sterile environment that gets contaminated with a small amount of bad bacteria (bad simply being defined as one that will probably make us sick if we come in contact with it or ingest it) is going to quickly become a far more dangerous thing than a non-sterile diverse ecosystem where there may actually normally be a fair number of bad bacteria but they tend not to get to grow out of control because there are so many other bacteria there as well. 

This is why the bacteria in hospitals can become such a danger.  The hospitals try to stay sterile but then any little bit of bad bacteria has no competition and runs rampant.  And then there is the extensive use of antibiotics and other antimicrobal meds wich give many of these microbes a chance to build up their resistance and become super bugs.

 

Catch ya later, I'm going out to play in the worm poop (full of microbes.)

 

If you have cuts or scrapes or burns on your hands, then wear gloves when putting your hands into your AP water.

[Jim Logios]

you are quite a wealth of info!  Thanks!

Perhaps we should create a TCLpedia ;-)

TCLynx said:

The bacteria isn't all that rare itself.  Different forms of it exist in freshwater and marine environments.  It is just rare that people get infected with it though not unheard of.  Most people who catch it are occupationally exposed to water and it usually infects pre-existing injuries.  It is rare that it becomes a really hard to combat flesh eating 5 year antibiotic resistant illness.

 

I have the impression that salt water aquarium keeping may be a bit more dangerous that freshwater to these sorts of illness but I'm mainly basing that on some of the gloves I've seen for sale for working with reef tanks (add to that the fact that they are also using nets and tongs rather than their hands along with those gloves.)

 

As to coexisting with the nitrifying bacteria, there is nothing that the nitrifying bacteria does that would inhibit other bacteria from existing in a system.  Actually we depend on lots of other bacteria for our systems to work really.  Heterotrophic bacteria is very important to the solids break down in AP system (this is what the worms actually eat and not so much the solids themselves, worms slurp up the bacteria up that have been breaking down the solids.)  We can hope that all the great beneficial bacteria will create enough diversity and out compete the bad ones but this is more  a situation of keeping the numbers of bad bacteria low enough not to be a major hazard rather than killing them all completely.  Truth is a sterile environment that gets contaminated with a small amount of bad bacteria (bad simply being defined as one that will probably make us sick if we come in contact with it or ingest it) is going to quickly become a far more dangerous thing than a non-sterile diverse ecosystem where there may actually normally be a fair number of bad bacteria but they tend not to get to grow out of control because there are so many other bacteria there as well. 

This is why the bacteria in hospitals can become such a danger.  The hospitals try to stay sterile but then any little bit of bad bacteria has no competition and runs rampant.  And then there is the extensive use of antibiotics and other antimicrobal meds wich give many of these microbes a chance to build up their resistance and become super bugs.

 

Catch ya later, I'm going out to play in the worm poop (full of microbes.)

 

If you have cuts or scrapes or burns on your hands, then wear gloves when putting your hands into your AP water.

[TCLynx]

ah, just read my posts and my blog or if you really want to see me going through the learning process, you can read my threads over on BYAP, but that could take a while since I started back the end of 2007 when I discovered that site.

http://backyardaquaponics.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=2640

 

Keep in mind that much of what I spout is just the laymens terms version of what I've read over the years.  I've never been good at real chemistry, I'm really just a good technician and can manage signal flow which to me is just the electronic version of water flow.