Day: 3 February 2021

by Dr Irina Metzler, FRHistS  Hand sanitisers, or hand satanizers as I prefer to dyslexise, are as ubiquitous a part of the pandemic as the masks. Unlike the masks, which will cause mainly individual problems (if you wear a mask, you’re restricting your own breathing, not someone else’s), hand sanitiser use at the level we’ve been seeing for the past 10 months is going to become one helluva headache in the none too distant future. That’s because apart from destroying your own, personal microbiome we’ve got a bigger picture to consider. Antimicrobial resistance across the board had been getting worse already before the pandemic hit. Already in 2018 it was noted that alcohol-based hand sanitisers in particular were turning bacteria into the next level of ‘superbug’, namely VRE (vancomycin resistant enterococci), one of the leading causes of infections in hospitals. “We have to be careful about this new trend towards heavy reliance on alcohol-based hand sanitizers. Soap and water should be our number-one protection” – both in hospitals and for personal use. The next question is whether the bacteria will continue to evolve and tolerate higher and higher doses of alcohol – or even stop responding entirely. “Is it possible for these organisms to develop complete resistance to alcohol?” These questions were also raised by researchers years before the advent ...

By Ben Hawkins Imagine you are walking across a bridge over a rail line. Suddenly you hear screams coming from under the bridge. You look down and see that four people are tied to the tracks. What’s worse, you look up and see what looks like a runaway train carriage hurtling towards them. The carriage doesn’t look that big – if you could push a large object over the bridge in front of the carriage, you figure that it would be enough to stop the carriage and save the four people tied to the line. Looking around for such an object, you see an incredibly fat man stood at the edge of the bridge. He looks big enough to stop the carriage. Do you push him, knowing that falling from such a height and being hit by the carriage will almost certainly kill him? Do you sacrifice one life, to save four others? This is an example of a trolley problem, a hypothetical scenario designed by ethicists to examine how we should behave in different situations. The above example is tricky, because whilst we would usually agree that four lives are more important than one life, the positive act of killing someone goes against many of our moral intuitions. Most people, when asked what they would do in this scenario, ...

Today's update on Lockdown Sceptics is here. Includes an analysis of why ICU numbers aren't falling by a senior doctor, a comparison of those US states that locked down and those that didn't and a Postcard From Rwanda.