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Imagining the Post-Antibiotic Future
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Health authorities have been struggling to convince the public that the threat of totally drug-resistant bacteria is a crisis. Earlier this year, British chief medical officer Sally Davies described resistance to antibiotics as a 'catastrophic global threat' that should be ranked alongside terrorism. In September, Dr. Thomas Frieden, the director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, issued a blunt warning: 'If we're not careful, we will soon be in a post-antibiotic era. For some patients and some microbes, we are already there.' Now Maryn McKenna writes that we are on the verge of entering a new era in history and asks us to imagine what our lives would be like if we really lost antibiotics to advancing drug resistance. We'll not just lose the ability to treat infectious disease; that's obvious. But also: The ability to treat cancer, and to transplant organs, because doing those successfully relies on suppressing the immune system and willingly making ourselves vulnerable to infection. We'll lose any treatment that relies on a permanent port into the bloodstream — for instance, kidney dialysis. We'd lose any major open-cavity surgery, on the heart, the lungs, the abdomen. We'd lose implantable devices: new hips, new knees, new heart valves. We'd lose the ability to treat people after traumatic accidents, as major as crashing your car and as minor as your kid falling out of a tree. We'd lose the safety of modern childbirth. We'd lose a good portion of our cheap modern food supply because most of the meat we eat in the industrialized world is raised with the routine use of antibiotics, to fatten livestock and protect them from the conditions in which the animals are raised. 'And it wouldn't be just meat. Antibiotics are used in plant agriculture as well, especially on fruit. Right now, a drug-resistant version of the bacterial disease fire blight is attacking American apple crops,' writes McKenna. 'There's currently one drug left to fight it.'"
If this is a threat that "should be ranked alongside terrorism" then I'm not even going to waste my time reading about it.
Saying something is as scary as terrorism is like saying it's as dangerous as marijuana.
They just want money, so they say there will be some sort of catastrophe so they can get funding for their so-called studies. They even managed to throw in think of the children on top of their other hyperbole. I, for one, want absolute iron-clad proof that something disastrous will happen before we lift a finger to prevent it.
The above post may contain toxic doses of sarcasm.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Too many antibiotics in the food supply is a major part of what's causing this problem in the first place!
"British chief medical officer Sally Davies described resistance to antibiotics as a 'catastrophic global threat' that should be ranked alongside terrorism."
So it's just a minor concern? Good to hear, I was starting to get worried here.
Will the market save us by producing something be it at a price, or, is this too big and needs to be done by government money and research?
It's not that Origin of Species is exactly a new book. By the time we developed the antibiotics evolutionary biology was well understood.
I guess as usual , no-one was thinking about long-term consequences.....also I wonder how did my grandparents managed to be successful farmers - earning the most money in the whole family while supporting themselves and the families of their sons with agricultural products (I don't remember my family buying much flour, cheese, meat , fruits and vegetables for decades) without antibiotics. I mean they hardly used machines let alone chemistry...
Sorry for the provocation, but is there anyone who still thinks that free market capitalism is any good in anticipating (let alone solving) global long-term issues?
The loss of effective antibiotics is a genuinely 'catastrophic global threat'; terrorism is a largely imaginary risk for most people with considerably less chance of negatively affecting their life than going near a road. If terrorism was a single fire ant on your leg then widespread drug resistant bacterias would be a pissed off Hippo stomping you into the ground.
Do we blame politicians for not treating this as important and instead pissing billions away on 'the war on terror' or do we blame ourselves for being so ignorant that we (on average) don't care about this major issue but throw our support behind whoever promises to spend most on protecting us from often imaginary bogeymen.
Of all the things they could have compared it to, they chose terrorism?
A post-antibiotic future is a lot more serious than freakin' terrorism!
... to divert the billions of dollars of the "fight" against terrorism directly into medical research.
Easy solution: Ban the use of antibiotics in the meat industry.
Of course then people wouldn't get their insanely cheap meat anymore.
Boohoo - what a disaster.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
This is going to be a self made tragedy.
How many times have people gone to the doctor for a cold but the doctor gave them antibiotics almost as a placebo. How many times have people not used the entire bottle of antibiotics? Some ranchers give antibiotics to their live stock as a matter of course so that they can get fatter faster.
Then of course after the Ronald Reagan/Margret Thatcher revolution everything has to be about profits. Well there isn't much profit in antibiotics. If you have a really good antibiotic then the medical comunity will be likely not to perscribe it. They would want to save it for the really nasty bugs. Even if it is perscribed a lot people will only get one bottle and then stop taking it after their infection goes away. The drug industry would rather come up with something like statins; that is something they can put rich people on for the rest of their lives (I am sure there are some in the industry that would rather keep giving out statins than to cure heart disease.) Don't even get me started on creationsits' heads exploding because their bacterial infections are actually evolving.
We already have kids basically getting killed off because they picked their scabs on a minor cut and then got the wrong type of bug. Before antibiotics any little cut was a possible death sentence. Looks like if something isn't done (and I am not holding my breath) we are going to get back there sooner rather than later.
Terrorism, a non-issue indeed. But false flag operations? That's another story.
Saying it ranks up there with terrorism to the rational mind doesn't really make it sound like much as terrorism is actually relatively rare and peanuts are actually more dangerous than that. It would be more dangerous than terrorism if it ranked up there with tap water....
THIS ranks up there closer to alcoholism or AIDs if not worse.
If the natural food supply is in danger, it's time to build food replicators.
Companies make more money by creating drugs that make you feel better only while continuing to purchase their drugs. Cure a disease and you lose a customer; lesson their symptoms and you have a customer for life.
how did we ever make it through the 15th century ?
The prophylactic use of antibiotics has long been identified as a problem and yet people couldn't manage to stop their ridiculous fear of "getting sick." You know, getting sick once in a while isn't so bad. Keep your immune system strong and healthy and getting sick is a minor inconvenience. Instead we've got a system of marketing driven by ridiculous fears. Sure, wash your hands. But with anti-bacterial soaps all the time? What could possibly go wrong? Certainly not a weakened immune system resulting from a decreased demand load right?
And the crap they allow in the livestock industry? Holy crap. How is that NOT supposed to get into our water and our food?
"Before antibiotics any little cut was a possible death sentence." Really? I wouldn't go quite that far. Conventional remedies took care of the vast majority of such things when I was a child. Iodine, mercurochrome, hydrogen-peroxide and all manner of antiseptics seem to do the job nicely. Of course things needed near-immediate attention and all that but so what? Why do we have to believe "give me a shot and I'll be just fine!" and continue on as if there would be no other effects?
One of the real kickers for me is the scares we've had over the past what? 20 years now? Talking about superbugs and MRSA and all that? Name one thing that has been done to really combat the trend? I know what *I* have done -- I have ensured my practices are nearly opposite of what ever soccer mom does. You won't find "anti-bacterial soap" in my home. There is only the standards like Irish Spring and Ivory. I will not feed into the unrealistic fear pushed onto the public to sell more product. And when I do take medications, I will be sure that (1) I actually need it and (2) it will be far more effective on me because I don't have any acquired resistance.
I think you've been watching too many Hollywood movies and reading sensationalist newspaper and magazine articles. Pandemics, just like hurricanes and earthquakes, happen all the time and kill millions, but they don't "devastate the world" and "kill us all." You're being alarmist.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Well, better get to work on Nanites with laserbeams attached to their heads, bacteria can't evolve to be resistant to that =]
That is another part of the problem. Sensationalism and fiction have warped our world view so much that big problems do not seem all that major since they do not live up to their fictionalized versions. If it is not fast and movie-style dramatically devastating it does not really register for a lot of people.
Which is a bit ironic since on the other end all sorts of relatively minor things with small effects get hyped up into 'OMG' deals, like terrorism.
Hopefully our biotech is starting to get to the point where we can tailor viruses to specific targets, at least some of the time. Things like this give me some hope. If we can do that, we can do at least some of that kind of tailoring.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
The summary says:
We'd lose a good portion of our cheap modern food supply because most of the meat we eat in the industrialized world is raised with the routine use of antibiotics, to fatten livestock
This the source of the problem, not the effect.
Yes, it does turn out that dosing meat animals with antibiotics even when they are not sick will increase their weight (and hence production) by about 10%, This is a small increase-- but the margin on meat production is low enough that it makes a difference in profitability, and hence if some of the farms do it, pretty much all of them follow.
So, we're losing the ability to use antibiotics because we're spraying them across the landscape, not to cure sickness, but as a fattening agent for cattle.
and protect them from the conditions in which the animals are raised.
This is actually a much smaller use of antibiotics. But, yes, the idea is that we can save money by not bothering with sanitation and health in cattle, but instead just dose them with antibiotics.
Anonymous wrote:
As ranching employs a significant number of people in some states, and agrobusiness has great clout with Congress, this just isn't going to happen. Plus, the average American is not going to accept such a sudden stop to his high meat intake.
Actually, it's a very small effect-- eliminating antibiotic use on cattle would have only a trivial effect on price. The problem is that the low margin on meat production means that if one cattle-production factory does it, everybody has to do so to keep up.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Beef is cheap in the US because they feed cattle corn instead of grass. Cattle are not designed to eat corn, so they get bloated and sick. They're also kept confined in small areas in conditions that promote the spread of disease, so they need antibiotics.
The environmental and humanitarian catastrophe of large-scale factory-farming is a major culprit in the abuse of antibiotics and the rise of antibiotic-resistant organisms. Sometime down the line, we're going to pay the true cost of the "cheap" food.
with the restructuring of our health care coverage here in the US.
Coincidence?
Rick B.
We humans are so acutely clever ... if only we could keep ourselves from doing such stupid things!
Oh dear! What's to become of us?
What is it with the livestock, that would do nothing to solve the problem, doctors give out antibiotics like there f'in candy to anyone and everyone.
It would do something to solve the largest part of the problem
Amount of antibiotics sold by manufacturers for use by food-producing animals: 13.1 million kilograms
Sold for use by people: 3.3 million kilograms
80 percent of antibiotics sold in the US go to increasing meat production from farm animals.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/28/opinion/antibiotics-and-the-meat-we-eat.html
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/oct/15/louise-slaughter/rep-louise-slaughter-says-80-antibiotics-are-fed-l/
http://www.rodalenews.com/antibiotics
Just because you are a vegan doesn't mean you should peddle some false information.
Just because you are an Anonymous Coward doesn't mean you should peddle some false information. There, fixed it for you.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
they have harmed no one.
Those of us who have been in and around the industry have seen this developing for a long time. The solutions are straightforward but face enormous resistance from those currently benefiting from how antibiotics are currently misused.
1) Ban the use of antibiotics in livestock except to actually treat disease. As the article notes, >60% of all antibiotics by volume are used to fatten livestock in the absence of disease. Because the USDA regulates livestock production rather than the FDA it becomes a jurisdictional quagmire to try to limit use in livestock. While there isn't much antibiotic left in meat when it goes to market, the runoff from stockyards provides the perfect mixture of bacteria and diluted antibiotic (and metabolites) to create resistant strains.
2) Stop prescribing antibiotics in novel classes for routine things like ear infections and sinus infections. Studies show that most of those will clear up on their own without antibiotic treatment, but nobody wants to be the guy who feels miserable but doesn't get a Z-Pak or some fluroquinolones as treatment.
3) Ban these ridiculous anti-bacterial soaps and things that contain triclosan. It's creating cross-antibiotic resistance and isn't even that effective at killing bacteria during primary use because people don't leave it on long enough.
4) An earlier poster asked if the lack of corporate investment to find new antibiotics is a market failure, and the answer is yes. Besides the enormous dysfunction that permeates big pharma in general, the reality is that antibiotics are generally not nearly as profitable as once-a-day drugs that last a lifetime. Either provide regulatory incentives for antibiotic development or do more of the research at the government level or both.
5) In the long run, we need a completely different approach to managing bacterial infection. An earlier poster mentioned phages, and there are multiple different research avenues that show some promise if we can get them going.
Software Shouldn't Suck
E-mail: frank at jacquette dot spamless com (remove the spamless!)
and its decided that there's no money in it. Sorry poors!
The DR, XDR, and TDR bacteria crisis is a making of medical malpractice by shoddy doctors who don't know how or when to use antibiotics.
In 2011, doctors wrote 225,000 scripts for antibiotics for symptoms of viral infection. They wrote 981,000 prescriptions with a dose lower than dosing guidelines called for, and 291,000 prescriptions that were not long enough in duration to meet antibiotic usage guidelines.
When Doctors don't even know how to use modern medicine correctly, what else do you expect?
This is not even to mention the issue of interfering with natural selection and devolving our species. Antibiotics make the bugs evolve faster, and the humans evolve slower. It's only a matter of time before a mass extinction event.
"We'd lose a good portion of our cheap modern food supply because most of the meat we eat in the industrialized world is raised with the routine use of antibiotics, to fatten livestock and protect them from the conditions in which the animals are raised."
So lets not raise them that way.
It would probably help if agencies like the CDC and HHS used sentences like "This would likely kill a few hundred people worldwide, so don't panic" in their press conferences and speeches instead of phrases like "with potential to harm millions of people around the world" (citation), not to mention the obligatory references to how many tens of millions were killed by the 1918 flu (no mention, of course, of the fact that this was largely do to a world war, and very primitive sanitation and medical treatment at the time).
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
Sounds like a win-win to me. There's no avoiding natural selection, it'll bite us in the ass sooner or later.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
I'm telling you... nanites with freakin laser beams on their heads, no more issues. Or.. transporters with screening capabilities. Invest in that.
And people remember their history.
Some, however, prefer to berate people who read or learn things and have the unmitigated GALL to remember things.
Like you.
How are they supposed to justify their budget requests if they don't maximize the threats they are supposedly protecting us from?
Antibiotic resistance is a serious issue, but a lot of the summary is hysterical nonsense.
Dialysis patients are more susceptible to infections, but dialysis doesn't require antibiotics. Even if all antibiotics disappeared tomorrow, they would still go on having dialysis. The possibility that they might get an infection that kills them is far less than the absolute certainty that they would die without dialysis.
In the same vein, surgery, implanted devices and treatment for accidents also don't require antibiotics, even though they are usually given proactively to prevent infection. Nobody is going to let someone bleed to death rather than risk causing an infection by suturing a wound.
Yes, antibiotic resistance means more people dying from infections, but it's not some enormous apocalypse that prevents all medical treatment and automatically infects and kills everyone in the hospital.
When does American Idol's new season start?
Sigh. Start using multi-antibiotic cocktails, especially with drugs that operate on different methods such that a single mutation to cover all of them is highly unlikely.
If you can do that and keep the side effects down, you can win. One antibiotic at a time is how you go about evolving resistance.
Put the math to work for you. It exponentiates the chamce of resistance. If it takes one of a quadrillion bacteria to develop resistance to one (covered by millions in billions of people) then a single one mitating two ways simultaneously is in the one in. is in the one in nonillion range, and three is the one in. whatever the hell 15-illion is. This would also require worldwide use lest stupid countries ise the cocktail drugs individually.
There is work to be done but it can be. Stop being idiots and put the math to work for you.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
So, your anecdote is that you've never had your life save by antibiotics. So what? Are you suggesting that the scientists are saying that 100% of the population will die without antibiotics? No, they are saying that many more people will die without them than with them. This seems self-evident to me, but apparently people like you are more difficult to convince. You do seem easily convinced by anecdotes, however, so, I'll see your anecdote with a couple of my own.
When he was about 5, my son was running on the deck and tripped. As he slid along the desk, a very then (willow) tree branch got shoved up into his leg about 4 inches or so. I pulled out as much as a could, but a good inch or so of tree branch broke off and got left behind. Our choices were to treat the infection and let his body gradually dispose of the foreign substance or cut his leg open and remove the branch. Either way, without antibiotics he would have been quite unlikely to survive.
As a child my mother got strep throat. Her family could not easily afford a doctor and so that waited to see if she would just get better. Instead, it developed into scarlet fever. She had to spend a year of her childhood confined inside and on heavy antibiotics or she would have died.
I myself have had numerous infections: strep throat (many times, mostly as a child), bronchitis, etc. At least one of these would have been fatal without antibiotics.
So, by these anecdotes, three of every four people will die without antibiotics, right? Wrong. Anecdotes aren't statistics, so stop trying to marginalize real issues with "well it's never happened to me" bullshit, OK? We are all very impressed that you've lived 50 years and never needed antibiotics except for preventative purposes, but you are not the norm.
Apparently, the administration is always right there when a new regulation or law manages to funnel large amounts of money to its donors and buddies in industry.
But when public health is actually at risk, such as the overuse of antibiotics in livestock, the Obama administration actually fights against sensible regulations and restrictions.
I'm not sure how it goes in other countries but it should be the same especially from the youtube movie called earth but the way industrialized countries raise they're livestock is really alarming. For example, here in Québec (east of canada for those who don't know where exactly) pigs are in big warehouses where they're usually born and raised but because there's so much of them in 1 space because of today's needs, they give them antibiotic. Of course, they're system removes most of the antibiotic after time but theres a small percentage that they keep and when they get killed so they sell there meat for us to eat, we get those antibiotics because they can't be removed 100%
So who's to blame here... if there is one to blame. I honestly believe society as a whole is to blame since they want meat. Companies gives them what they want because they want to make profit. On the other hand, people want meat as well so its an endless loop. If this continues at this rate.. Time for me to change my diet lmao
"We'd lose a good portion of our cheap modern food supply because most of the meat we eat in the industrialized world is raised with the routine use of antibiotics, to fatten livestock and protect them from the conditions in which the animals are raised."
Stop buying factory farmed Produce and Meat. Buy from small farmers that don't feed antibiotics to livestock and don't use antibiotics on plants. Yes, it is a little bit more expensive than the government subsidized industrial farmed cheap food but how cheap is your life? How expensive is cancer? What is the cost of antibiotic resistance.
You make choices.
Like over-use of DDT and the mis-use of the same caused DDT resistent mozzies and yet it's whined about over and over again how bad "the ban on DDT" (which never happened) is and how it killed millions (which never happened).
Why?
Because there's a business selling pesticides.
Because it can be used to "prove" governments are evil and must be opposed at every turn.
Governments are run by people too.
"Terrorists unleash torrents of antibiotics on unsuspecting public"
It sounds much better for population control than mandatory sterilizations.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
Not to mention the almighty "Global Pandemic". "Global" of course being completely redundant.
The book "Demon under the microscope" looks at the creation and popularization of the first widely used antibiotic, sulfa. It does a good job of describing all the horrible problems society was dealing with before sulfa came about. It's pretty scary to imagine a scenario where antibiotics don't work anymore.
That makes it sound like a made up threat.
The problem is that they need to change the METHODS doctors use to prescribe medicines... Right now Doctors just throw random pills at stuff and just hope we get better from MINOR illnesses. We're going to have to treat minor illnesses with more "nursing" and homio-therapy that let our bodies do most of the work along with lots of cleaners like bleach to kill germs and start reserving antibiotics for serious cases under STRICT doctor control. That means no more pills sent home, lots more meds given as shot or IV so every patient, every time gets the prescribed doses... Because half-doses are a collective slow death to the little germs that survive.
On first principles this is bullshit. The public have been struggling to get antibiotics put back in the medicine bottle where it belongs. No one wants this stuff loosed. We struggle to get it our food paying premium prices for organic, antibiotic-free meats. We struggle to find it in the grocery isle to keep antibiotics out of products like our dish soap. This political bullshit right here on Slashdot in our face as the ' public' made us do it. Its the ' public' responsibility. Fuck off I say to BigPharma exactly the way BigTobacco. A moron understands the negative ramifications of antibiotic use. Stand up, push back and blow back JonQPublic.
Call me crazy, but I went to Germany for back surgery. This was open cavity, enter from the front to access the spine surgery. The operation was performed in a positive pressure clean room. Doctors scrubbed with protein denaturing substances (i.e. there is no antibiotic resistance....nothing survives protein denaturing). When the operation was finished they stitched as per usual, and while still inside the clean room, applied a liquid-bandaid like substance effectively sealing my body cavity from the outside world. Any air that remained inside was cleaner than what it started with. Then with proper wound care, it healed up just fine. Several weeks later after I had figured it was all healed, I had a minor staph infection which I actually believe to be from an ingrown hair right near the scar. Not a big deal though, ingrown hairs are normal every day problems. Beyond that minor incident, it was infection free. Is antibiotic resistance a problem? Yup, is it as catastrophic as they are saying? Hell no. Worst case for people with weakened immune systems, they may have to remain in the clean room a little longer, which will cost only slightly more than the average US Hospital bed stay...
Emos will be history...
I dunno - the flu epidemic of 1918 would have been pretty devastating, had we not be so enthralled with the idea of devastating each other. Twenty million dead, if I recall correctly. Roughly equal to the number of those killed in the world war. I know that World War One was considered devastating.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Absolutely! I'm in my 50s, and I've taken antibiotics twice, both preventative after dental work. Cuts and scrapes get soap and bandages.
Doesn't your soup contain antibiotics? If your soap doesn't kill microbes, what good is it?
Is the current 23,000 deaths per year in the US due to antibiotic resistant bacteria enough to get excited about?
Just do what the greeks do, put a little windex or lysol on it and you'll be fine...
Mark me -1, callous, but ....where's the problem?
7 billion is a ridiculously high number of people on this planet anyway.
I'd guess frankly (as much as this might make people squirm) that most of the deaths are going to come in the bottom 50%ile of people - the ones doing most of the breeding, btw, and who frankly contribute little or nothing to humanity. Oh no, Kolkata (Calcutta) only has TWO million people mostly living in squalor in 2050? Is that really a tragedy?
FWIW I'm not intending anything racist or classist about this - the fact is that I'd be PERFECTLY FINE if a 50% cull took place in the US and Europe as well. If it's me that's culled, and I know that the next generation gets to live in a world with 50% fewer people, I'd be fine with that too.
Sorry if this offends your "every life is a precious snowflake" sensibilities, but when there are too many snowflakes around here, we call a snowplow.
-Styopa
The human race as a whole is extremely stupid. Who wants to start a betting pool that the average person will not be as fearful of this "post antibiotic" future as they are about terrorism, and thus allow inaction to continue?
It is time to stop using antibiotics in meet production at least to the extend we have to day. And it is time to invest money in antibiotics. Pharma companies have little interest in the research, as they cannot make a lot of money out of something which quickly cures you. It is more suitable for them to have chronic diseases.
Compare that to how many people around the world die from non-antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and I would say no, it's not enough to get excited about.
As an aside, how many of those deaths are of people who acquired the bacteria while in the hospital for a planned procedure? As opposed to how many of the 23,000 died from a minor scrape or even moderate cut?
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
What *I* don't get is how many people modded you "insightful", when the comment you reply to even SAID it is sarcasm.
Olive oil infused with cannabis oils and cinnamon oils (Look up holy anointing oil) works wonders on infections and significantly boosts the immune system.
Freaking amazing what this stuff can do when made with high CBD cannabis... grows skin back on diabetic sores when everything else fails. Extremely powerful anti-biotic.
Keep it Clean! :D
(learn about this and more at TheCleanGame & Net )
I know it is callous, but people worry more about deaths in their own countries than in others. Assuming they could be saved with effective antibiotics, at 23K per year lack of effective antibiotics is causing almost twice as many deaths as would removing all seatbelts and airbags in vehicles. Would you get excited if someone took all of the seatbelts out of your family's cars/trucks?
http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/pdf/esv/esv18/CD/Files/18ESV-000500.pdf
Most of the deaths are hospital acquired C. diff: shitting yourself to death. MRSA acquired outside of the hospital ('cause hospital hygiene is now good enough to prevent most MRSA infections) causes more excitement: it's very visible and very fast.
I guess that'd solve the problem of rising health care costs
Just stop using massive amounts of antibiotics on cows, chickens, and pigs in the factory farms.
With antibiotics becoming less effective, and molecular biology making such advances, perhaps medicine will stop relying so exclusively on antibiotics (selective poisons) and increase the use and development of antiseurms (mixes of antibodies specific to small regions of the pathogen's surface).
Indeed: When antibiotics were the new "magic bullets", some diseases still responded far better to antiserum treatment than the antibiotics the doctors switched to treating with.
In those days making antiserums was a matter of injecting the pathogen into an animal (typically a horse), then (after a few days) extracting some antibodies (to EVERY pathogen the horse had experienced) and injecting the lot into the patients.
Now we can identify the "conserved regions" that the bug can't change without becoming non-pathogenic, making human antibodies to those regions, sorting out the most effective ones, transplanting the DNA into suitable cell cultures, and making exactly the desired antibody by the bucketload.
With a library of antibiodies to test against we have automated mechanisms - based on silicon chip technology - to assay a pathogen against thousands of them and identify the effective ones within minutes.
Antiseurm the body's own, very effective, way to prevent a recurrence of a disease or infection that one has already survived. But the body's own R&D and deployment takes about three days. Like doctors giving antibiotics, it relies on more general approaches to fight off the initial infection. Giving it assistance with the better-tuned countermeasure in the early stages should be at least as effective as antibiotics were before the development of resistance.
Antibodies can be made to just about any molecular shape the bug exposes to its surroundings. (The hard part is avoiding making one that also appears on normal tissue.) The antibody works, not just by jamming up some necessary machinery in the pathogen, but also by marking the pathogen for destruction by the rest of the patient's immune system. So this approach should work on just about any bug that isn't avoiding the immune system by hiding inside cells or other places it can't reach, or has already devastated the body's clean-up crew.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
hey people,
falling out of a tree can cause compound fracture. that's when you break a bone so badly it punches out through the skin. that's a little bit more than a scrape or cut. minor probably wasn't the best adjective for this.
the threat of a post-antibiotic future will happen and there will be much human suffering and death. however, there's nothing you can do about it. so why worry about it? one of nature's self-correcting mechanisms. humans evolve to out-wit most of nature's threats. humans become extremely populous. the viruses and bacteria that find our bodies hospitable have a 'happy pasture' in which to flourish and evolve. medicine can no longer help when a bad strain has taken hold. people start suffering and dying. most mothers and babies can't recover from the trauma of birth fast enough to fight them off. human populations reduced. rate of virus and bacterial evolution reduced.
"Sally Davies described resistance to antibiotics as a 'catastrophic global threat' that should be ranked alongside terrorism. "
Stupid comparisons don't help the case. "Terrorism" is mostly a propaganda piece, isn't anywhere near "catastrophic", and is, arguably, mostly of government creation and relatively easy to remediate in the short term (historically speaking). Comparing the political jargon du jour with a perhaps permanent end to antibiotic effectiveness would be laughable if it wasn't so tragically brain-dead.
In approximately a hundred years the human population has exploded asymptotically from about a billion people to seven billion and ticking. The once in geologic time windfall of effectively free and infinite hydrocarbons (the agricultural revolution has produced copious food by using ten calories of fossil fuel to produce and deliver about 1 calorie of food). But I expect keeping this population alive is equally a side effect of antibiotics. How many people know a person who probably wouldn't be alive today if not for one or more antibiotic interventions in the past? What is the compounding effect of that and pandemics we have sidestepped with early antibiotic interventions?
There are a number of comparably pressing human problems: thermonuclear and/or biologic war and resource depletion come to mind. Personally I'd put fiat / ponzi currency up there pretty high as well. Now we face the extinction of privacy as governments around the world go rabid, led by the US...that seems like a big one. But "terrorism"? I've been trying to come up with a really suitable comparison to just how stupid a comparison this ding-dong has made but, honestly, I am at a loss.
Come on everyone, back to leeches and faith healing * we go, just like $diety_0 intended !
The real danger is that we come up against a highly contagious bacteriological disease that we now treat with antibiotics. Then it's the Spanish flu/black plague x 1000.
* We'll make the witch burning optional for now.
You aren't successful because there is no evidence to back you idea. It's been looked at, many times. Fact is, there is no scientific evidence that any antibiotic resistance is coming from give antibiotics to cows.
Yes, I know it's counter intuitive, but when you look at the data it's clearly coming from too places:
People not finishing the regime, and hospitals.
On a dark street, a man encountered a neighbor who was searching the ground beneath a streetlight. On questioning, he stated that he had dropped my house keys and I'm looking for them. The man joined the hunt, but no key was found anywhere under the light. He stopped and asked, "Are you sure you dropped your keys here?" The neighbor replied, "No, they could be anywhere".
"So, why are you only searching here?" The neighbor looked back at the man and replied, "I'm looking here because the light's much brighter."
Infections in humans and hospitals are much more closely researched and tracked. On the other hand, the agri-business industry in the US has been rather unfriendly towards attempts to study problem of antibiotic resistance there, and research funding is a tiny fraction of what is spent on diseases in humans.
Another major problem is that --outside of a few far-sighted individuals -- only in recent times has the spread of multi-drug resistance become a topic of concern among researchers (with concern among politicians and the general public being an ephemeral awareness that comes and goes with the mass-media news cycle). Antibiotic use in animals simply wasn't being studied at the time resistance was first arising, and to a large degree we're trying to figure out what happened after the fact.
So you are correct, the preponderance of evidence shows antibiotic resistance first being found in humans, and circulated between humans. However, be aware this preponderance may be an artifact.
I know it is callous, but people worry more about deaths in their own countries than in others. Assuming they could be saved with effective antibiotics, at 23K per year lack of effective antibiotics is causing almost twice as many deaths as would removing all seatbelts and airbags in vehicles. Would you get excited if someone took all of the seatbelts out of your family's cars/trucks?
It's funny you mention that situation. I've said before that the best way to make driving safer is to take all seatbelts and airbags out of all vehicles, and mount a large pointy spike on the center of the steering wheel. Have it long enough to come about 3 inches from the driver's chest. If you get into an accident, you will be impaled and die. Do this for one year.
Sure, a lot of people will be killed in the first few months, but the most dangerous drivers will be weeded by their own actions in that time. After the spikes are removed, and driving returns to normal, we would be amazed at how safe 'normal' is.
I'm still waiting for my White House petition to get enough signatures to hear from the president if he likes the idea or not.
http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/pdf/esv/esv18/CD/Files/18ESV-000500.pdf
Most of the deaths are hospital acquired C. diff: shitting yourself to death. MRSA acquired outside of the hospital ('cause hospital hygiene is now good enough to prevent most MRSA infections) causes more excitement: it's very visible and very fast.
And that's why I agree with the posters above about the over-hyping of the "you'll die from a skinned knee" line. (Not that you are doing that. Just in general for this thread.) The newly-evolved antibiotic resistant microbes aren't in my backyard, hiding under my trees.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
You will feel better if you read up on microphages. These are proteins that can harm viruses and bacteria.
âoeIn theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not." â Albert Einstein
It's interesting how nature tends to "level the playing field" despite man's best attempt at tilting it in his favor, isn't it? The history of homo sapiens is littered with "unintended consequences" of our "intelligence" yet we still keep believing we can solve any and all problems!
I imagine once a bacterium is immune to some antibiotic and we stop using it, the immunity will gradually fade again until the antibiotic is effective again (as immunity may cost something and is not of any other advantage evolutionary). So did anyone ever conduct tests on this?
The live stock industry uses tons of precautionary antibiotics. All adding to this problem of resistant bacteria and such.
The market, us, should be able to regulate this. If we are comfortable with the consequences, we could keep eating products that required lots of pesticides and antibiotics.
Privacy is terrorism.
Try a Google image search for infected scrape, then see how blasé you feel about a future with no effective antibiotics.
Hasn't happened to you in 30 years? That's a pretty small sample size to base your (ignorant) opinion on.
It gripped her hand gently. 'Regret is for humans,' it said.