Stronger than dirt

by
January 26, 2009

The Yankees are sanitizing their new home with some sort of specialized disinfectant coating in order to prevent staph infections. Infectious disease expert Paul Sax, M.D. wonders if they’d be better off simply scrubbing the place down with some Comet. Then again, these are the Yankees, so if they’re going to solve a problem, you can bet your life that they’ll do so in the most unnecessarily expensive way possible. While they’re burning money, they might as well give all of their players a curative galvanic belt too.

By the way, Dr. Sax is not just a Harvard Medical School professor and the Clinical Director of the HIV Program and Division of Infectious Diseases at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He’s also a ShysterBall reader going back to the old Bull Magazine days. But before you say anything, if you think that I’m offering up this little tidbit simply to make me seem smart and special by showing off how brainy and accomplished my readership is, well, you’re 100% correct about that.


6 Comments
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
Jason @ IIATMS
15 years ago

Can someone slather some of that stuff on ARod after being around Madonna a bunch?

0
The Common Man
15 years ago

“While they’re burning money, they might as well give all of their players a curative galvanic belt too.”

This brings back memories.  Growing up, I took a lot of dates to the Museum of Questionable Medical Devices (http://www.museumofquackery.com), in Minneapolis.  And, you know, it worked far more often than it should have.  I miss that place.

http://www.the-common-man.com

0
MooseinOhio
15 years ago

Ride those coattails – ride them for as long as you can.

0
Sal Baxamusa
15 years ago

As I said over at Primer:

From what I can tell, CSG uses a quaternary amine as their anti-microbial agent. Quaternary amines kill microbes by disrupting the cell membrane. It’s thought that this mechanism does not promote mutation of resistant bugs because the cell membrane doesn’t evolve on the time scale of action. In fact, plants present a similar chemical as an anti-microbial agent on their surfaces.

You can read more about it in Trends in Biotechnology, volume 23, issue 7, page 343 (2005). (doi:10.1016/j.tibtech.2005.05.004).

I was hoping to start a super-nerd thread over at Primer, but it never materialized.  But that’s just my day job getting in the way of reading baseball blogs. 

Back to the RSS feed…

0
Ron
15 years ago

Well, I guess I’m here to counter balance the Doc and bring you back to average.

0
Jesus
15 years ago

So those NFL teams with bunches of staph infections never heard of Comet? 

You claim its the most unnecessarily expensive way possible but there is no mention of cost in either link.

I wonder what the cost of using Comet on every surface that is being coated 81 times a year compares to the coating cost.

0