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#nuclear #medicine - Using nanoparticles boosts x-ray effectivness in treating drug-resistant bacterial infections
12/10/12
#nuclear #medicine - Using nanoparticles boosts x-ray effectivness in treating drug-resistant bacterial infections
Superbugs are scary things. The prospect of patent deaths from MRSA infections has led many hospitals to drastically change their way of doing business, and a few have gotten into deep trouble for trying to cover up problems. A new paper describes an interesting approach to treatment of such infections. Experiments suggest that putting bismuth particles (nanoparticle-sized) in a wound will enhance the ability of X-rays to treat the infection. An X-ray with dose about the same as a chest X-ray by itself kills only 6% of the bacteria. With the bismuth nanoparticles present, the same X-ray treatment was found to kill up to 90% of the bacteria. The researchers chose bismuth for their experiments because of its relatively high absorption cross-section for X-rays.
See the paper: Yang Luo, et al., " Targeted nanoparticles for enhanced X-ray radiation killing of multidrug-resistant bacteria", Nanoscale, 23 Nov 2012 (online), DOI: 10.1039/C2NR33154C
I read about it at FreeRepublic.com. Thanks to FReeper neverdem
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