Well, I'm screwed.

/allergic to Levaquin

I wonder how many people will have a severe allergic reaction to
die from this?

AbbeySomeone: I wonder how many people will have a severe allergic reaction to
die from this?

There have already been people severely injured by it, and probably some fatalities. It's a fluroquinolone antibiotic, and all of them have nasty side effects including my favorite, "spontaneous tendon rupture". As in, you're walking up the stairs and your Achilles tendon pops. Fun!

Pffft. I'll stick with my pocket (and mask) full of posies, thanks.

This is not a repeat from 1348 when it would have been more helpful

About a dozen people a year in the Southwest get the plague, in case you didn't know.

GAT_00: This is not a repeat from 1348 when it would have been more helpful

About a dozen people a year in the Southwest get the plague, in case you didn't know.

It's the brown people?

dahmers love zombie: AbbeySomeone: I wonder how many people will have a severe allergic reaction to
die from this?

There have already been people severely injured by it, and probably some fatalities. It's a fluroquinolone antibiotic, and all of them have nasty side effects including my favorite, "spontaneous tendon rupture". As in, you're walking up the stairs and your Achilles tendon pops. Fun!

Yes and I'm a freak for not trusting pharmaceuticals. How the hell does it cause a tendon to pop? That sounds incredibly painful.

"Make a toast of white or of the second bread, as you think good, and sprinkle on it being hot a little good wine vinegar, made with Rose leaves, and for want of it any good common or used vinegar, & spread on the toast a little butter, and cast thereon a little powder of Cinnamon, and eat it in the morning fasting. The poor which can not get vinegar nor buy Cinnamon, may eat bread and Butter alone, for Butter is not only a preservative against the plague, but against all manner of poisons."

AbbeySomeone: I wonder how many people will have a severe allergic reaction to die from this?

I wonder if you were suffering from the Bubonic Plague if you would really care either way? From what Camus tells us, it wasn't exactly the feel good epidemic of the summer.

To hell with antibiotics, somebody call me a bubo-lance!

GAT_00: This is not a repeat from 1348 when it would have been more helpful

About a dozen people a year in the Southwest get the plague, in case you didn't know.

Also NCIS agents.

namegoeshere: GAT_00: This is not a repeat from 1348 when it would have been more helpful

About a dozen people a year in the Southwest get the plague, in case you didn't know.

Also NCIS agents.

NCIS agents only get the version that kills itself after 24 hours.

AbbeySomeone: dahmers love zombie: AbbeySomeone: I wonder how many people will have a severe allergic reaction to
die from this?

There have already been people severely injured by it, and probably some fatalities. It's a fluroquinolone antibiotic, and all of them have nasty side effects including my favorite, "spontaneous tendon rupture". As in, you're walking up the stairs and your Achilles tendon pops. Fun!

Yes and I'm a freak for not trusting pharmaceuticals. How the hell does it cause a tendon to pop? That sounds incredibly painful.

I'm not sure that they know. But yes, I'd imagine it's not comfortable, and would likely necessitate surgical repair, which would require postoperative antibiotics, etc.
If you need fluroquinolones, by all means take them. But read the actual Prescribing Information (Google *drug name* PI) before you take the first dose. It may suggest ways you can keep safer while taking them.

You've got a week to live and die in extreme agony or you can take this antibiotic.

Sorry doc, I've had bad experiences with medication. I'll wait for advances in holistic medicine. You know, I'm kind of growing attached to these painful bumps and lesions and I've always thought having fingers is vastly overrated.

Levaquin has been out HOW LONG ???
so stupid subby nothing is being released.
fda is jsut officially saying that you can use Levaquin for the plague
lol

brap: You've got a week to live and die in extreme agony or you can take this antibiotic.

Sorry doc, I've had bad experiences with medication. I'll wait for advances in holistic medicine. You know, I'm kind of growing attached to these painful bumps and lesions and I've always thought having fingers is vastly overrated.

meh
everyone knows that prayer is the only answer

GAT_00: namegoeshere: GAT_00: This is not a repeat from 1348 when it would have been more helpful

About a dozen people a year in the Southwest get the plague, in case you didn't know.

Also NCIS agents.

NCIS agents only get the version that kills itself after 24 hours.

True. But they almost die anyway, and then their lungs are scarred which is the only way they are not declared dead when an unscarred-lunged charcoal corpse shows up in their asploded convertible.

It's a tough job, that.

Not a new drug. Just a new approved usage.

I guess those silly bird, swine, kitten flu doesn't carry the kind of fear the drug companies are looking for. Look for a straight up ______ plague in the near future.

If people would brush their teeth regularly, they wouldn't need treatment for it in the first place.

AbbeySomeone: GAT_00: This is not a repeat from 1348 when it would have been more helpful

About a dozen people a year in the Southwest get the plague, in case you didn't know.

It's the brown people?

No, the brown people know better than to play with dead prairie dogs.

This is not a repeat from 1348 when it would have been more helpful

You know what would really have helped in 1348? A whole bunch of this:

/unfortunately, rattus was holier than cattus at the time

namegoeshere: Well, I'm screwed.

/allergic to Levaquin

Me too. It gives me the tendon pains like nothing you've ever imagined. A shame, because it cured my sinuses in record time.

powerful Johnson & Johnson antibiotic

LeroyBourne: I guess those silly bird, swine, kitten flu doesn't carry the kind of fear the drug companies are looking for. Look for a straight up ______ plague in the near future.

The problem is they aren't giving out cool names anymore. It's stuff like "JW61-Y". Who's going to panic over a disease like that? How about "Death Pox" or something with Necrotizing in the name.

/Black Death

i upped my meds-up yours: /unfortunately, rattus was holier than cattus at the time

Actually general sanitation, like the Romans had 1,000 years earlier, would've helped a lot. Also people bathing regularly. Like the Romans did, 1,000 years earlier.

AbbeySomeone: Yes and I'm a freak for not trusting pharmaceuticals. How the hell does it cause a tendon to pop? That sounds incredibly painful.

No, you're a freak for not understanding that every drug out there has side effects, there is no way to create a 100% side-effect free drug because of the way biological systems work, and that it's rather important to use the drug as it's supposed to be used to reduce those side effects.

AbbeySomeone: I wonder how many people will have a severe allergic reaction to
die from this?

See. This. This right here. This is why we make fun of you.

Not that you're distrusting of big businesses, or skeptically view the use of anitbiotics.

No. This is why we make fun of you, Abby.

Apparently India still has the plague...

I mean, THE PLAGUE.. PLEASE!

WhyteRaven74: i upped my meds-up yours: /unfortunately, rattus was holier than cattus at the time

Actually general sanitation, like the Romans had 1,000 years earlier, would've helped a lot. Also people bathing regularly. Like the Romans did, 1,000 years earlier.

But but but.... Baby Jesus!

Deacon Blue
AbbeySomeone: GAT_00: This is not a repeat from 1348 when it would have been more helpful

About a dozen people a year in the Southwest get the plague, in case you didn't know.

It's the brown people?

No, the brown people know better than to play with dead prairie dogs

Dead ones ain't the problem,the fleas that carry plague will hop off & look for a warm body,like the moran that pets the cute little prairie dogs.

6-7 years ago all the p'dogs in the valley died of plague.

/filthy,disease-ridden rodents
//cannibals too,how cute is that?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZy6Xil XDZQ&feature=youtube_gdata_playe r

Came to note this is not so much a new drug as a new indication for a flouroquinolone that's been out for a while, see I was beaten to it, came satisfied.

Also came to note that levofloxacin does knock the hell out of a bug but also knocks the hell out of your joints/tendons, also came satisfied. (Have had to take the stuff due to catching the bad kinds of bronchitis that tend to go into pneumonia quickly if not caught in time...doubly so in my case as I'm asthmatic and it's a rare day when something gentler like azithromycin works. :P)

"Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world; yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky. There have been as many plagues as wars in history; yet always plagues and wars take people equally by surprise."

I went to the CDC plague page and found that:

* In the USA (plague is endemic in the forested areas of the West Coast and Rocky Mountains, as well as well as some of the South West), plague is fatal in 1 of 7 cases (14%).
* There are 1,000 to 3,000 reported cases in the world each year. Unreported cases may be numerous in some of the poorer regions where plague is found.

PDF: http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/dvbid/plague /resources/plagueFactSheet.pdf

With the exception of China, India, Brazil and the USA, most of the countries reporting plague are developing or very poor countries. Those big population centers with relatively well off populations are the reason anybody is working on vaccines and medicine for the disease at all.

Given the high mortality, the epidemic nature of the disease, and the relative rarity of cases in modern times, the risk of taking vaccines has to be weighed against the risks of not taking them, and that is a substantial difference. Take the vaccine, you have a trivial chance of dying from it, don't take it, you have a much better than one in seven chance of dying and spreading the disease in any country less developed and less well-serviced with medical facilities and doctors than the USA. The pay-off is obvious.

I've read a number of books on epidemics, disease, rats, etc. I admire the cleverness and resiliance of rats, although naturally I admire them from a distance. You don't want a clever and resiliant pest or enemy close to home.

The plague has been connected to many of history's great disasters. This is because rat populations swing wildly, boom and bust like many wild animal populations. When an earthquake, famine, war, or drought disrupts the rats that live in forests around the world, they pour out of their territory into contact with humans. There are certain times of bamboo in India that produce massive crops of fruit on a decadal scale. When these bamboos flower, their flowering is followed a few years later by outbreaks of the plague in the areas affected. The rats face feast and famine--then they move from the bamboo to human villages and farms.

The plague may have left us a valuable legacy--many of the European peoples who survived the plague carried a gene which provides some protection against the HIV virus. Up to 10% of some European populations that were heavily hit by the plague in the 1300s and 1400s carry a variant of the gene that protects them from HIV, a similar virus. Natural selection increased the percentage of these populations with the gene, making it easier for their descendants to survive another disease centuries later.

I have also read many books on probability and risk. Risk management is something very poorly understood by humans. We tend to be impressed by some kinds of threats and to ignore others.

For example, we are more frightened by risks that are unfamiliar, unusual and showy--such as rare but massive natural disasters. We are liable to ignore common, familiar and much greater risks such as obesity, automobile accidents, etc. Something graphic is more frightening than something invisible and stealthy.

The risk of even a very bad vaccine is almost always much lower than the risk of the disease. A vaccine is not contagious. If the vaccine kills one person, other people are not going to catch the vaccine.

I distrust governments, pharmaceutical companies, oil companies, as much as think is rational, but I don't ignore facts, logic or risk calculations. You are much better off with a corporate medicine and a good doctor than with a witchdoctor and some kind of quack remedy (even if it is a quack remedy promoted by medical doctors--there's plenty of BAD doctors, few very good doctors.

All in all, I'd sooner take my chances with the remedy than the disease unless the side effects for me personally are very severe. After all, people have different genes and different lifestyles, environments and personalities. The way a drug affects you may not be the way it affects me. The drug that is perfectly safe for most will inevitably kill a few because of some quirk of interaction between patient, doctor, medicine, and so forth. Mistakes are common among doctors and patients. Lies are told, errors are made, information is not shared.

I love this quotation from George Bernard Shaw: "The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place."

Medicine is about communication as much as communicability. Modern communications technology, like speech, sometimes seems to exist only to conceal people's thoughts, to confuse and to destroy facts.

I distrust corporations and do not want to be governed by them, but other "persons" are even more unreliable and even more able to convince us of things that are not true because gosh darn it, idiots are sometimes just so nice, and concerned, and confident. Incompetent people do not know they are incompetent. They mislead us by misleading themselves first.

The anti-science forces at work have been given an enormous boost due to communication that gives every person (corporate or individual), the power to communciate with every other moron.

We drown in a sea of "information" and even those who are best at sorting out truths from truthiness and lies and errors, just can't separate the massive amounts of noise from the small amount of fact and logic and truth.

In the last ten or twenty years, every human people who can type with one finger has been given a voice and has been exposed to the voices of many loonies, cranks, liars, propagandaists and PR hacks that they would never even have known existed before the advent of the web.

"It 'taint what you don't know that does the harm," said Will Rogers, "it's what you know that 'taint so." He's another of my touchstone "philosophers".

dahmers love zombie: There have already been people severely injured by it, and probably some fatalities. It's a fluroquinolone antibiotic, and all of them have nasty side effects including my favorite, "spontaneous tendon rupture". As in, you're walking up the stairs and your Achilles tendon pops. Fun!

Why would something like that be legal? That sounds like a case where the cure is worse than the disease. Is there nothing better that doesn't spontanously rupture something?

My favorite side effect of levaquin is when it turns you into a vampire.

Ambivalence: Why would something like that be legal? That sounds like a case where the cure is worse than the disease. Is there nothing better that doesn't spontanously rupture something?

A ruptured Achilles tendon is worse than dieing of pneumonic plague?

This is not a repeat from 1348 when it would have been more helpful

To be fair, it only took the FDA 664 years to fast track this use of the drug!

BronyMedic: AbbeySomeone: Yes and I'm a freak for not trusting pharmaceuticals. How the hell does it cause a tendon to pop? That sounds incredibly painful.

No, you're a freak for not understanding that every drug out there has side effects, there is no way to create a 100% side-effect free drug because of the way biological systems work, and that it's rather important to use the drug as it's supposed to be used to reduce those side effects.

AbbeySomeone: I wonder how many people will have a severe allergic reaction to
die from this?

See. This. This right here. This is why we make fun of you.

Not that you're distrusting of big businesses, or skeptically view the use of anitbiotics.

No. This is why we make fun of you, Abby.

But, don't you see? She's a MOTHER!!! She just KNOWS what's best for her kids! How DARE you! HOW DARE YOU!!!

whosits_112: BronyMedic: AbbeySomeone: Yes and I'm a freak for not trusting pharmaceuticals. How the hell does it cause a tendon to pop? That sounds incredibly painful.

No, you're a freak for not understanding that every drug out there has side effects, there is no way to create a 100% side-effect free drug because of the way biological systems work, and that it's rather important to use the drug as it's supposed to be used to reduce those side effects.

AbbeySomeone: I wonder how many people will have a severe allergic reaction to
die from this?

See. This. This right here. This is why we make fun of you.

Not that you're distrusting of big businesses, or skeptically view the use of anitbiotics.

No. This is why we make fun of you, Abby.

But, don't you see? She's a MOTHER!!! She just KNOWS what's best for her kids! How DARE you! HOW DARE YOU!!!

I know, I'm worse than Hitler's holocaust. Anne Frankly, I don't blame you for putting me reich on the spot because of it. You people are Goehring to stop me.

BronyMedic: whosits_112: BronyMedic: AbbeySomeone: Yes and I'm a freak for not trusting pharmaceuticals. How the hell does it cause a tendon to pop? That sounds incredibly painful.

No, you're a freak for not understanding that every drug out there has side effects, there is no way to create a 100% side-effect free drug because of the way biological systems work, and that it's rather important to use the drug as it's supposed to be used to reduce those side effects.

AbbeySomeone: I wonder how many people will have a severe allergic reaction to
die from this?

See. This. This right here. This is why we make fun of you.

Not that you're distrusting of big businesses, or skeptically view the use of anitbiotics.

No. This is why we make fun of you, Abby.

But, don't you see? She's a MOTHER!!! She just KNOWS what's best for her kids! How DARE you! HOW DARE YOU!!!

I know, I'm worse than Hitler's holocaust. Anne Frankly, I don't blame you for putting me reich on the spot because of it. You people are Goehring to stop me.

I bet you fed your kids Goebbels Baby Food.
/Got nuthin'

BronyMedic: Ambivalence: Why would something like that be legal? That sounds like a case where the cure is worse than the disease. Is there nothing better that doesn't spontanously rupture something?

A ruptured Achilles tendon is worse than dieing of pneumonic plague?

My sister's Achilles tendon ruptured all by itself (without being on Levaquin). It was pretty bad and took her the better part of a year to recover. My own reaction to Levaquin was awful--shooting joint pains and agony in all my tendons that stopped immediately upon cessation of the drug.

However, death by coughing up your plague-infested lungs would be infinitely more painful, and probably take a lot longer to recover from, so, no, I'd prefer the ruptured tendon, thanks.

Shouldn't we be introducing Levaquin into animal feeds so they will fatten up quicker?

Ew, Levaquin. Horrible stuff. If I ever have to take it again in my life, it'll be too soon. I end up taking a lot of antibiotics because I have deformed kidneys that make me very prone to infection. I had to take Levaquin for a kidney infection that wasn't responding to the usual Keflex, and I'm violently allergic to erythromycin and the derivatives thereof.

It knocked out the infection like a champ, but I had vertigo so bad for the first 48 hours that I was vomiting if I opened my eyes or tried to stand up instead of crawling from bed to the bathroom.

I'm not entirely sure dying of the plague wouldn't be preferable to doing that again.

Rusty Shackleford: [files.myopera.com image 550x435]

"Make a toast of white or of the second bread, as you think good, and sprinkle on it being hot a little good wine vinegar, made with Rose leaves, and for want of it any good common or used vinegar, & spread on the toast a little butter, and cast thereon a little powder of Cinnamon, and eat it in the morning fasting. The poor which can not get vinegar nor buy Cinnamon, may eat bread and Butter alone, for Butter is not only a preservative against the plague, but against all manner of poisons."

THESE are the cures THEY don't want you to know about!

Tali: Ew, Levaquin. Horrible stuff. If I ever have to take it again in my life, it'll be too soon. I end up taking a lot of antibiotics because I have deformed kidneys that make me very prone to infection. I had to take Levaquin for a kidney infection that wasn't responding to the usual Keflex, and I'm violently allergic to erythromycin and the derivatives thereof.

It knocked out the infection like a champ, but I had vertigo so bad for the first 48 hours that I was vomiting if I opened my eyes or tried to stand up instead of crawling from bed to the bathroom.

I'm not entirely sure dying of the plague wouldn't be preferable to doing that again.

Well, only because after dying from the plague you wouldn't be getting up afterward to tell us about your recovery...

a vacine against bubonic plague should only be taken by people who live in or work in extreme high risk areas.
Modern plague does not transmit person to person, the flea vector only moves out of its rodent hosts when the host dies, it only seeks out a non rodent host when there are no other rodents availible. A secondary, although much rarer way to get the plague is to eat a freshly killed raw rodent. Modern Plague does not transmit from human to human. the amount of plague bacteria in a human host is minute thus there is no chance that a Cheopsis Flea (the only one that transmits plague) could transfer plague from human to human. The single known case of human to human transfer of modern bubonic plague occured in Madagascar (close down everything) where local healers attempted to treat the plague by biting into the plague boils and sucking the fluid out. their subsequent cases of the plague were treated the same until 20+ people died.

People who are in cities or near medical facilitites where plague is common can go to a local ER and be treated with a 99% cure rate. A small number of US tourists in Mexico contract Plague but no deaths have been reported in this group.

Cholera is a much more serious threat than plague in the regions of Central and N. South America.

Tooth paste and a biannual cleaning have worked for me.

Wonderful, I just finished reading The Stand...

WhyteRaven74: i upped my meds-up yours: /unfortunately, rattus was holier than cattus at the time

Actually general sanitation, like the Romans had 1,000 years earlier, would've helped a lot. Also people bathing regularly. Like the Romans did, 1,000 years earlier.

Isn't actually spread by fleas? I believe the rats are crucial in some way to the "life cycle" of the disease, but the actual vector was flea bites?