QUOTE(Aladoc @ Aug 10 2004, 12:42 AM)
Had a two year old today grow out MRSA form a furuncle on her bottom. And do I have problems. Only one drug to be used as an outpatient. I hate this resistent bacteria.
Researchers are developing molecular "daggars"
The actually stab and bust up bacteria!!
QUOTE
New clothes stab bugs with molecular daggers
19:00 02 April 03
Exclusive from New Scientist Print Edition. Subscribe and get 4 free issues.
Tiny molecular daggers that latch onto fibres stab and destroy microbes have been created, meaning "killer clothes" may soon be available. Anti-fungal socks could take on athlete's foot while, on a more serious note, military uniforms could kill anthrax.
In the past, glass surfaces coated with miniature antibacterial saws have killed bacteria. But now a molecule that "stabs" microbes has been developed by Robert Engel, of Queens College at The City University of New York, and colleagues.
The molecular dagger has two sections. The stubby end, or dagger handle, is made of two interlinked, nitrogen-rich carbon rings. The "blade" is a carbon chain up to 16 atoms long, populated only by hydrogen atoms. It has a strong affinity for fatty surfaces.
To attach the daggers to a material, a solution of the daggers is used to coat the fabric. The nitrogen on the rings latch onto proteins in wool and silk, and carbohydrates in cotton. They do this by ousting hydrogen and oxygen complexes and attaching themselves instead. The result? A surface armed with minuscule fat-seeking blades.
Spills their guts
When bacterial or fungal spores approach the fabric, their negatively charged fatty membranes are attracted to positive charges on the nitrogen-rich rings and to the fat-seeking blades. This forces the bug or spore onto the blade, which then penetrates the bacterial membrane.
Once inside, this charged end wreaks havoc and kills the spore by disrupting the delicate bonds inside. Each spore encounters a number of these molecular chains and eventually breaks up. "The bacteria effectively spill their guts," says Engel.
More on this story
Subscribe to New Scientist for more news and features
Related Stories
Old clothes filter out cholera
13 January 2003
Breakthrough patches detect dangerous chemicals
17 August 2001
Bacteria could create self-cleaning clothes
5 July 2001
For more related stories
search the print edition Archive
Weblinks
Robert Engel, CUNY
Shantha Sarangapani, ICET
225th National Meeting, American Chemical Society
"It's like resting on a bed of nails", adds his colleague JaimeLee Iolani Cohen of Pace University in New York. Household detergents, also mixtures of fatty and charged groups, disperse dirt and germs in a similar way but cannot be anchored to clothing.
In tests on silk, wool and cotton seeded with different fungi and bacteria, including culinary yeast and Candida, the yeast that causes thrush, all of the pathogens were destroyed. By varying the length of the blade's carbon chain, the coating could be "tuned" to kill superbugs such as Pseudomonas aeruginosa. So to ensure the deaths of as broad a range of organisms as possible, the fabrics are coated with daggers of a mixture of chain lengths.
Military uniforms treated with the daggers might one day spike anthrax spores. But the US Army fears that the robust pathogen could nestle in clothing fibres and spread - perhaps years after an attack. Shantha Sarangapani, who develops protective clothing for the US Army, says: "The New York group has modified some of our fabrics but I need to get them independently tested. Anthrax is a good survivor, so we will have to wait and see."
Engel's research was presented at the American Chemical Society's annual meeting in New Orleans.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?...p?id=ns99993579
). He was put on IV Vancomycin 250ml daily and will be on it for the next four to six weeks as an outpatient.