Cannabis helps fight resistant bacteria

With fewer antibiotics available to treat resistant bacterial infections, the possibility of entering a pre-antibiotic era is looming ahead.

Alternative strategies are being explored and helper compounds are attracting attention. Helper compounds are non-antibiotic compounds with the capability of enhancing the efficacy of antibiotics.

How to boost antibiotics

One such helper compound has been suspected to be cannabidiol (CBD); a cannabinoid from the cannabis plant. Now a research team from University of Southern Denmark, has published a scientific study proving the effect of CBD.

Janne Kudsk Klitgaard is Principal Investigator and corresponding author. First author is PhD student Claes Søndergaard Wassmann. The study is published in the journal Scientific Reports.

When we combined CBD and antibiotics, we saw a more powerful effect than when treating with antibiotics alone. So, in order to kill a certain number of bacteria, we needed less antibiotics, they say.

Bacteria clones spread globally

In the study, CBD was used to enhance the effect of the antibiotic bacitracin against Staphylococcus aureus bacteria; a major human pathogen that frequently causes community- and hospital-acquired disease.

Multidrug-resistant clones of this pathogen have spread globally. In some countries, treatment of bacterial infections with these resistant bacteria are difficult and the problem is projected to be an ever-larger problem in the future.

According to the researchers, the combination of CBD and antibiotics may be a novel treatment of infections with antibiotic resistant bacteria.

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How do the bacteria die?

Three things happened with the Staphylococcus aureus bacteria, when the researchers treated them with the combination in their study:

The bacteria could no longer divide normally.

The expression of certain key genes (cell division and autolysis genes) in the bacteria was lowered.

The bacterial membrane became unstable.

Anti-resistance must be stopped

According to the researchers, overuse of antibiotics is the main cause of antibiotic resistance.

If we combine an antibiotic with a helper compound, that enhances the effect of the antibiotic, we need less antibiotic to achieve the same effect. This may contribute to the development of fewer resistant bacteria, says Janne Kudsk Klitgaard.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/03/200324131833.htm

I was looking for Fauci’s statement on Ebola vaccine and when they produced it they didn’t have to use it, might be from the day before but he said zip, they didn’t have to use. I’ll keep looking for the Ebola comment. These pandemics are a scam by medical community and Pharma to scam money from US

Read his remarks

Remarks by President Trump, Vice President Pence, and Members of the Coronavirus Task Force in Press Briefing

Issued on: March 26, 2020

DR. FAUCI: Thank you Mr. Vice President. I’m going to change the topic just a little bit because there was questions that came up and I’ve been asked about this on a couple of media interactions regarding the interventions that we’re talking about. And it’s important because it’s about something that I said yesterday, about what we would likely see.

Whenever you put the clamps down and shut things down, you do it for two reasons: You do it to prevent the further spread — as we call, mitigation — but you also do it to buy yourself time to get better prepared for what might be a rebound. It may be a rebound that we get things really under control, and then you pull back, which ultimately we’re going to have to do. Everybody in the world is going to have to do that. You’re either going to get a rebound, or it might cycle into the next season.

So what are we going to do to prepare ourselves for that? One of the most important things is one that I mentioned several times from this podium, and that is to clarify a bit about the timeline for vaccines and would that have any real impact on what we would call “the rebound” or what we call a “cycling in the season.”

Certainly, for sure, a vaccine is not going to help us now, next month, the month after. But as I mentioned to you, we went into a phase one trial. And I keep referring to one vaccine; there’s more than one. There’s a couple of handfuls of vaccines at different stages of development, but they’re all following the same course. And the course is: You first go into a phase one trial to see if it’s safe and you have very few people, 45 people, within a certain age group — all healthy, none at really any great risk of getting infected. And the reason you do that is because you want to make sure that it’s safe.

Then the next thing you do — and that takes about three months, easily, maybe more. So that’s going to bring us into the beginning or middle of the summer.

Then you go to a phase two trial, or what we say “two-three,” which means we’re going to put a lot of people in there. Now we hope that there aren’t a lot of people getting infected, but it is likely there will be somewhere in the world where that’s going on. So it’s likely that we will get what’s called an “efficacy signal,” and we will know whether or not it actually works.

If, in fact, it does, we hope to rush it to be able to have some impact on recycling in the next season. And like I said, that could be a year to a year and a half. I’m not changing any of the dates that I mentioned.

But one of the things that we are going to do that you need to understand — that has been a stumbling block for previous development of vaccines — and that is, even before you know something works, at risk, you have to start producing it. Because once you know it works, you can’t say, “Great, it works. Now give me another six months to produce it.”

So we’re working with a variety of companies to take that risk. We didn’t take it with Zika. That’s why, you know, we have a nice Zika vaccine but we don’t have enough to do it because there’s no Zika around. Same with SARS. So that’s one of the things we’re really going to push on is to be able to have it ready, if in fact, it works

Q If I could just get back to what you’re saying about this idea of risk in drug manufacture. Are you saying that at some point in the phase two trials, that if you’re seeing some form of efficacy, that you may try to convince a laboratory to spool up production at that point so that there is a reservoir on hand?

DR. FAUCI: Even before.

Q Even before.

DR. FAUCI: When I go into phase two, I want to find somebody that is going to make it.

Q And who would pay for that?

DR. FAUCI: Well, partially the federal government, I think, in some respects, to de-risk it, but also investments by the companies. A lot of companies are not shy now about doing that. Usually, when you do that at risk, John, you’ve got to give some backup for them, and we’ve done that.

We’ve put hundreds of millions of dollars into companies to try and make vaccines. I wouldn’t hesitate to do that for a moment now

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-vice-president-pence-members-coronavirus-task-force-press-briefing-12/

Dr. Fauci’s History in Spending Billions of Government Funds on Vaccine Research with Little to Show for it

Published on March 27, 2020

A profitable crisis

In early March, Congress passed an emergency coronavirus spending bill, much of which will “directly benefit the drug industry.” Legislators who tried—and failed—to include meaningful affordability provisions in the spending bill worry that

“A danger remains that the federal government will simply write a blank check signed to big pharma as a result of this crisis.”

Clues that pharma is embracing the opportunities furnished by the COVID-19 crisis come from the financial markets. Market reports indicate that the health care industry has been able to “withstand” the wider stock market plunge due to big gains by pharmaceutical, biotech and medical diagnostic companies involved in developing coronavirus-related products.

After Moderna announced, in late February, that it had shipped off its mRNA-1273 to NIAID for the Phase 1 trial, the company instantly became “one of the hottest biotech stocks on the market.” (Moderna’s NASDAQ ticker symbol is, handily enough, MRNA.)

Investment advisors have pointed out that the likely promotion of mRNA-1273 as prevention is a “big deal” that stands to make Moderna a fortune, because “millions” of uninfected people will want to “pre-emptively protect themselves.”

Coronavirus drug and vaccine manufacturers are also sitting pretty because of liability immunity conferred under the 2005 PREP Act (Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act) and a follow-up Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Declaration specific to COVID-19 published in the Federal Register on February 4, 2020.

The PREP Act protects the manufacturers of medical “countermeasures”—including vaccines, medications, medical devices and other products—from the risk of damages in the event of a declared public health emergency such as the currently declared coronavirus pandemic.

https://vaccineimpact.com/2020/dr-faucis-history-in-spending-billions-of-government-funds-on-vaccine-research-with-little-to-show-for-it/