Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
A likely cause of this drug resistance is use of antibiotics to increase growth rate in livestock. It has been recently shown that for certain livestock simple sanitation methods can be superior to the use of antibiotics. It is also likely that there are superior methods to antibiotics for all livestock,
To follow your profit motive, most of the antibiotics in the US, 80%, are sold for agriculture. While we can assume that antibiotics for agriculture are sold for less than human use, and so the pharmaceuticals firms will not go immediately bankrupt if agricultural uses are outlawed, we can assume the shock to the sector will be significant.
Given that antibiotics in humans has become a minor part of the business, it is not unreasonable to assume that researchers must find an alternative.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Frontline did a story on this on PBS. It's worth a watch. Everyone should. Effectively, theirs not much researches can do I'm afraid. Nothing short of genetic engineering and what not, the chemical common denominators used as antibiotics (while not harming the host) is pretty much useless to these new evolved forms of bacteria.
Life is not for the lazy.
It's not that Origin of Species is exactly a new book. By the time we developed the antibiotics evolutionary biology was well understood.
Market forces vs. scientists sounding the alarm: “It is not difficult to make microbes resistant to penicillin in the laboratory by exposing them to concentrations not sufficient to kill them There is the danger that the ignorant man may easily underdose himself and by exposing his microbes to non-lethal quantities of the drug make them resistant.” -- Fleming while accepting his Nobel prize in 1945
Non-Linux Penguins ?
How often are scrapes and cuts (or even car accidents) treated with antibiotics?
All the time. What do you think Neosporin has in it?
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Ah, yes, since you've never needed it, nobody else will. MRSA is already killing more people in the US than AIDS.
If you don't understand any of my sayings, come to me in private and I shall take you in my German mouth.