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Global Biological Experiment Generates Exciting New Results

Posted by Unknown on from the we're-all-gonna-die dept.

New submitter hoboroadie writes "Scientific American Magazine says antibiotic-resistance genes have moved from the incubators of our hospitals and factory farms, and are spreading through diverse species in the wild. Resistance genes have been detected in crows, gulls, houseflies, moths, foxes, frogs, sharks and whales, as well as in sand and coastal water samples from California and Washington. This stuff is getting more and more like a Hollywood script everyday, n'est ce pas?"

13 of 340 comments (clear)

  1. But.. by i+kan+reed · · Score: 5, Insightful

    We had a half a percent higher profit margin on cattle for a couple decades. That's totally worth having permanent incurable deadly diseases. Tragedy of the commons sucks balls, and time and again, it turns out that the "invisible hand" won't develop any solution to it.

    1. Re:But.. by ObsessiveMathsFreak · · Score: 5, Funny

      The ghosts of Friedrich Hayek and Ayn Rand find your lack of Market faith disturbing.

      --
      May the Maths Be with you!
    2. Re:But.. by i+kan+reed · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I interpret it literally because there are fundamental scientific principles at work here, like convection, and the carbon cycle, which humans have not demonstrated any capacity to overcome in any sort of pragmatic sense.

      Your attitude treats the market like a magic wand that you wave and *poof* no more serious real-world problems.

    3. Re:But.. by gstoddart · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Does market capitalism solve everything? No. It has some glaring weaknesses.

      I'll still take it over totalitarianism - no matter how benign or benevolent it says it will be.

      Right up until capitalism leads to its own form or totalitarianism, as corporations and cartels control pretty much everything and we all become serfs again.

      Capitalism claims to be benign and benevolent, but since everyone tries to gain an unfair advantage and cheat the system, it just leads to a different form of losing your freedoms. The notion that it will self correct assumes that people are honest and not inherently out to screw everyone over -- which is completely disconnected from reality.

      Left to its own devices, capitalism will subject you to the same atrocities, it will just defend them on a different set of principles.

      Some people have mythologized capitalism and the free market to the point of it being a religion -- it is uncritically championed as being perfect and infallible, and completely ignores many aspects of human behavior which negate some of its assumptions. And once you are convinced that you are the keeper of Immutable Truth and Knowledge, you will defend that belief to the exclusion of evidence to the contrary.

      --
      Lost at C:>. Found at C.
    4. Re:But.. by Mab_Mass · · Score: 5, Insightful

      You act as if there were no regulation of the health care industry. Indeed, it's probably the most regulated in the world. So what are the free-market forces which you claim are responsible for this issue?

      First of all, the regulation of the health care industry is to the side of this issue. The largest driver for resistance is the over-use of antibiotics in non-health care related fields, like industrial agriculture, and hand soap.

      The market forces here are the desire for higher meat production (ie, more profit!) as well as the marketability of antibiotics to consumers that don't realize that you don't need or want antibiotics everywhere.

      Where the market forces completely and utterly fail is that the very high cost of widespread antibiotic resistance is NOT being directly felt by the industries that are using them the most. It is in fact a very nice example of where pure capitalism fails - large, long-term, external costs are not felt by the people making short term profits.

    5. Re:But.. by ultranova · · Score: 5, Funny

      The ghosts of Friedrich Hayek and Ayn Rand find your lack of Market faith disturbing.

      The ghost of Ayn Rand should find her own existence disturbing, since ghosts are supernatural.

      --

      Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.

    6. Re:But.. by Altrag · · Score: 5, Insightful

      However, a tragedy of the commons is in no way in the interests of any individual!

      This statement is absurdly false. If this were true, there would be no tragedy of the commons to talk about because everyone would be on the look out for such situations.

      The tragedy of the commons happens because somebody does benefit from screwing everyone else over. In this particular case, if the beef industry was at all concerned with the tragedy of the commons, they would have abandoned antibiotic over-application years ago when resistant bacteria were first discovered.

      The free market fails because some things simply are necessarily shared -- the air we breathe for example. By your "free" market, you're perfectly free to pollute the air above your land as much as you want. But unless you've figured out how to control the wind, that polluted air is going to affect all of your neighbors.

      You, being the awesome capitalist that you are, see no reason to spend money installing air filters because what do you care? If you don't like the pollution yourself you just go ahead and use the money you saved on air filtering to buy a nice house a few miles away where it doesn't affect your personally.

      So now we're in a situation with one of three outcomes:
      - Your neighbors coerce you into installing air filters against your will.
      - Your neighbors have to install their own air filters (essentially being coerced by your lack of care, to use your terminology.)
      - Your neighbors just have to live with it (essentially being coerced to breathe bad air by your lack of care.)

      In all of those cases, some form of market-breaking coercion is in effect. And its unavoidable as long as air is able to freely move across our arbitrarily defined boundaries.

      Now you might say this is just an opportunity for more capitalism -- someone can just start producing air filters and make a fortune! This is true but it doesn't negate the fact that we're buying those air filters due to an initial breakdown in the market caused by you damaging an unavoidably shared resource.

      And that's an example with fairly immediate and obvious impacts. Something like the antibiotic resistance is neither immediate nor obvious, so you don't even have to be a complete jerk to screw up the free market -- you can manage to do so completely unintentionally.

      The free market works great under perfect conditions with a complete lack of externalities and a complete lack of barriers to entry. Unfortunately the real world doesn't have such conditions. The free market can still work well in the real world but some control must be influenced in order to prevent destroying public resources, prevent unnatural monopolies, keep natural monopolies in check and so forth. As usual, its very debatable exactly how much control is necessary for these purposes but it should be fairly obvious that the answer is neither "none" nor "total" but somewhere in between.

  2. Duh by onyxruby · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If you use something that kills of the weak members of a given entity over a period of time the result will be the surviving members will become strong. Darwinism is brutal and efficient like that whether you want it to be or not. In this case by over using antibiotics everywhere from handsoap to feed for cows we have resulted in the saturation of the environment. The result was inevitable and it really is a case of we did this to ourselves.

    If memory serves Norway prohibits their use in all settings but hospitals and has healthier citizens as a result. It really does boil down to the classic George Carlin germs are good comedy bit. We need regular exposure to germs to become stronger and build healthier immune systems. The only thing were building is stronger and healthier bugs and weaker humans - there's something wrong with that.

    1. Re:Duh by nctritech · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I wasn't a terribly "clean" kid; I didn't shower often at all and didn't wash my hands unless I was about to cook food. I still refuse to use hand sanitizer or anti-germ wipes and I don't expect every surface I touch to be disinfected. Some of that has changed as I have gotten older (I shower at least once a day and by most peoples' standards I'm quite "clean"), but I'm willing to bet that my "unclean" behaviors in the past and my lack of fear of germs and dirt and grease under the nails explain why I very rarely get sick (once a year maybe) and even more rarely stay sick longer than a few days.

      I read somewhere that there's a theory about auto-immune diseases being a result of humans no longer having parasites and infections. The theory was that the immune system has nothing to do and "gets bored." The possible solution is introducing a limited amount of relatively benign parasites. I don't feel like searching for it right now, but I found it to be a fascinating theory.

      As an added bonus, I can kill germ-o-phobes by breathing at them and there will be no evidence linking it back to me. I'M A FUCKING VIKING.

    2. Re:Duh by omems · · Score: 5, Informative

      Er, hygene hypothesis predates House by about 15 years http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygiene_hypothesis

  3. PBS Frontline "Hunting the Nightmare Bacteria" by rwyoder · · Score: 5, Informative

    http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/hunting-the-nightmare-bacteria/

    Scariest thing I've watched in a long time.

  4. Re:Mean two different things... by Charliemopps · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Actually, they've found that Bacteria and other organisms in your body do communicate through geene expression. So yes, Bacteria can change an animal in such a way that the animals own body informs future bacteria how to deal with antibacterial drugs.

    Secondly, the devastating bacteriological pandemic is already here. Hospitals around the world are now opperating under the assumption that they now have permanent, incurable Gram Negative bacterial infections throughout their hospitals. Most hospitals wont even release data on the subject. They're finding drug resistant bacteria in the drinking water wells in India. This Genie is already out of the bottle.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gram-negative_bacteria

  5. Re:Dystopia by interkin3tic · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Wrong agriculture business. This is antibiotic resistance. Monsanto is arguably causing herbicide and pesticide resistance, although such claims are stupid: they made the herbicides and pesticides, and they worked. It wasn't going to last forever if it was used widely, and if it wasn't used widely to make cheap foodstock, what's the bloody point?

    They even took steps to limit that much. The terminator seed technology was partly intended to prevent contamination: if the plants can't breed, they're less likely to mix with wild species and contaminate them. Obviously they had a lot of financial interest in it, both because if resistance gets into the pest populations, that's going to make their product worthless. And in response to the controversy and accusations that it would screw over farmers, Monsanto never actually put terminator seeds on the market.

    Anyway, pointing fingers is only so helpful, even at the agricultural entities that ARE driving antibiotic resistance. At this point, we know the looming disaster. It's not rocket science or even climate science either. This is high school biology. Businesses can be expected to faithfully act without any regard other than immediate profit. Ignorant patients will always find greedy doctors willing to give them antibiotics they don't need for diseases that aren't bacterial. Fixing the problem won't happen voulontarily. We need legislation to prevent milk from cows treated with antibiotics from being sold in supermarkets cheaper than untreated milk. Same with other livestock. It's an externalized cost: there's an advantage to it that needs to be taken away. We also need to strip the medical licenses of doctors who give out antibiotics for the cold. Either they're shockingly ignorant of the last 20 years of research and aren't fit to be doctors, or they're intentionally contributing to a real health hazard and should face criminal charges.