A slew of foreign tourists are heading to Mexican pet shops for a drug used by veterinarians to put cats and dogs to sleep that has become the sedative of choice for euthanasia campaigners.  Tourists from as far as Australia have travelled to Mexico to buy liquid pentobarbital, which causes a painless death in humans in less than an hour, right-to-die advocates say.

Clutching photos of the bottled drug to overcome a lack of Spanish, they have maps sketched by euthanasia activists to locate back-street pet shops and veterinary supply stores near the U.S. border. There they can buy a bottle for $35 to $50, enough for one suicide, no questions asked.

“We have a moral right to a peaceful death. I don’t want to die with a total loss of dignity, incontinent, barely able to see and stand up, suffering as my mother did,” said Bron Norman, a healthy 65-year-old Australian woman who spent $2,860 to fly to Mexico in March to buy pentobarbital.

Used legally across the world to anesthetize and euthanize farm animals and pets, pentobarbital, sometimes known by the trade name Nembutal, is tightly restricted to veterinarians. But lax regulation in Mexico means it can easily be bought.

Euthanasia campaigners call it “the Mexico option” and say they are willing to travel so far because pentobarbital is one of the few drugs that produces a reliable and tranquil death by sending a person to sleep before shutting down breathing.

Exit International has helped 250 people from Europe, the United States, Australia and New Zealand get pentobarbital in Mexico over the past few years. And, it says, interest is growing. Foreign buyers usually fly to U.S. border cities and cross over to Tijuana, Nuevo Laredo or Ciudad Juarez, the group says. A Reuters reporter buying a bottle in Nuevo Laredo was given a range of brands to choose from.

An aging populations in rich nations have sparked a global debate over the legality of euthanasia and the right of terminally ill people to bring forward their own deaths.

Euthanasia is legal only in the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Belgium, and the U.S. state of Oregon and doctors in those countries can use pentobarbital to end human lives. Many Christians around the world oppose so-called mercy killings, saying they go against God’s will.

But the case of Chantal Sebire, a French woman with an uncurable face-distorting tumour, rekindled the pro-euthanasia camp. Sebire was found dead of an overdose in March days after a court rejected her bid for assisted suicide.  In devoutly Catholic Mexico, most terminally ill entrust themselves to family or doctors rather than seek euthanasia.

A Mexican health ministry spokesman said it was working with the agriculture ministry to step up control of veterinary medicines, but declined to give details.  Australian interest in the “Mexico option” grew after the government overruled a state-level euthanasia law in 1997.  The Australian government banned Nitschke’s book, “The Peaceful Pill Handbook,” which gives tips on everything from carbon monoxide to buying pentobarbital in Mexico.

U.S. anti-euthanasia groups also deplore such activism. In the late 1990s, American doctor Jack Kevorkian — dubbed Dr. Death — was convicted of second-degree murder and jailed after he helped at least 130 people end their lives.  I think folks should control the way they live and die.

The fear of resistant infectious bacteria is rising.  These can spread rapidly across countertops, stethoscopes, and catheters. These “superbugs” infect up to 1.2 million patients a year in the United States, according to a 2007 report from the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology, and they’re quick to evolve defenses against even the most powerful antibiotics.

Now scientists in Scotland have come up with an alternative to antibiotics, which may effectively stop bacteria in its tracks. Janice Spencer and a team of researchers at the University of Strathclyde are developing nylon sutures coated with bacteriophages–viruses, found naturally in water, that eat bacteria while leaving human cells intact. New research by the Scottish team found that phage-coated sutures effectively stemmed infection in live rats.

Bacteriophages are not a recent discovery. During World War II, Russian doctors used cocktails of these viruses to treat soldiers infected with bacteria such as dysentery and gangrene. However, researchers soon turned their attention from bacteriophages to the rapidly rising field of antibiotics, developing new classes of antibiotics to combat ever-more-resistant strains of bacteria.

In water, these natural-born killers are extremely effective at eating up bacteria. The virus binds to bacteria and injects its DNA, replicating within its host until it reaches capacity, whereupon it bursts out, killing the bacteria in the process.

Obtaining bacteriophage-laden water samples is easy, says Spencer. The challenge is in keeping virus molecules active out of water. In dry environments, the virus’s proteins tend to fall apart in a matter of hours, rendering them ineffective against bacteria. Spencer and her colleagues isolated bacteriophages from water samples and developed a novel method to keep them active.

The team chemically bound bacteriophages to microscopic polymer beads by first breaking the surface of the polymer. Then the researchers added a linker molecule to the polymer’s surface, which in turn binds to bacteriophages and keeps them from falling apart. To test the virus’s virulence, the team first made small incisions in live rats, then infected them with Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus (MRSA), one of the most resistant strains of bacteria found in hospitals. Half of the rats were stitched up with sutures that were coated with polymer-bound bacteriophages. The other rats were closed up with untreated sutures.  Sounds like an exiciting step forward.

Corruption and poor oversight have undermined South Africa’s fight against HIV/ Aids, a new report says .  The authors, the Institute of Security Studies and Transparency International, say there has been a “potentially lethal cocktail of mismanagement”.

They blame South Africa’s president for questioning the link between HIV and Aids and say his stance has had an impact on the whole health system.  South Africa has the highest incidence of Aids in the world.  The report, titled A Lethal Cocktail, says 30% of the population is infected.

Politicisation of the disease has created numerous channels for abuse and is undermining attempts to counter it, the report says.  The authors conclude that it has become difficult to disentangle corruption from mismanagement and system failure as the root causes of the poor response to Aids.

Much of the responsibility is laid at the door of President Thabo Mbeki, whose well-known questioning of the link between the HIV virus and Aids has resulted in activists labelling him an “Aids denialist”.  The report says that his stand has had an impact throughout the health system, creating numerous channels for abuse.

The authors cite an example of a doctor dismissed for allowing a rape charity to use a disused hospital, because they were distributing anti-retroviral drugs.  Over-all it is a bad report for all of South Africa and brings up some glaring problems.