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A Post-Antibiotic Future Is Looming (www.cbc.ca)
New submitter radaos writes: A gene enabling resistance to polymyxins, the antibiotics of last resort, has been found to be widespread in pigs and already present in some hospital patients. The research, from South China Agricultural University, has been published in The Lancet. According to research Jian-Hua Liu, "Our results reveal the emergence of the first polymyxin resistance gene that is readily passed between common bacteria such as Escherichia coli and Klesbsiella pneumoniae, suggesting that the progression from extensive drug resistance to pandrug resistance is inevitable."
Work on alternatives is progressing — Dr. Richard James, former director of the University of Nottingham's center for healthcare associated infections, writes, "Until last month I was still pessimistic about our chances of avoiding the antibiotics nightmare. But that changed when I attended a workshop in Beijing on a new approach to antibiotic development based on bacteriocins – protein antibiotics produced by bacteria to kill closely related species, and exquisitely narrow-spectrum."
when I attended a workshop in Beijing on a new approach to antibiotic development based on bacteriocins â" protein antibiotics produced by bacteria to kill closely related species, and exquisitely narrow-spectrum."
While we've been working on making the better antibiotic, Russia has been working on phage therapy. Of course, we are the ones with the resources to develop it, not them. It should arguably be the other way around. The problem with this idea though, which is also the same reason we have antibiotic resistance today, is that you have to identify the problem before you can use it. We have an inadequate number of medical personnel pretty much everywhere in the world, and they already can't keep up with illness even using broad-spectrum antibiotics that historically have enabled them to help people without identifying a specific pathogen. They certainly don't have the time or training to do any better. We need more medical personnel, or nothing we do to try to fight these resistant illnesses is going to make a difference because we won't have the manpower to implement it.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
A gene enabling resistance to polymyxins, the antibiotics of last resort, has been found to be widespread in pigs and already present in some hospital patients.
Is that a roundabout way of saying that some complete and utter moron has been feeding the antibiotic of last resort to pigs in order to boost his profit margins and the resulting resistant bacteria are now spreading to humans? I could be wrong about that of course since I am not a bacteriologist, so for what other reason would polymyxins resistance be widespread in Chinese pigs and now spreading to humans?
Keep Chinese from sleeping with their livestock! Simple!
Look up the report
Novel Nanotechnology-Based Antiviral Agents: Silver nanoparticle neutralization of hemorrhagic fever viruses.
A viable solution has been available for quite some time.
The reason why antibiotic-resistant strains have been forming and allowed to be a problem is that people have been misusing antibiotics.
A small scale problem is that antibiotics have been used by human patients that would not benefit from them. Other patients have stopped or cut down on using antibiotics when they have started to feel well - but before the strain has been fully eradicated. In some countries, antibiotics have even been available over the counter without prescription.
A large scale problem is the over-used of antibiotics in agriculture. Livestock are given antibiotics in their feed as a precaution, and this is still going on on a large scale in most Western countries.
Antibiotics-resistant strains are widespread, even the norm in many parts of the world.
Seriously, this has to stop! We need to treat this problem seriously. If a resistant strain of bacteria is found on a farm then that farm should be put in quarantine and the stock of animals should be destroyed, like what happened when Mad Cow Disease - but instead this is seen as normal. Diseased eggs and meat are the norm, and I am not talking about third-world countries. I am talking about Western Europe and the USA.
"We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
Odds are good that in most industrialized countries, feeding this sort of antibiotics to pigs to maximize profits would be highly illegal. On top of that, even many industrial farmers would maintain sufficiently high standards that they wouldn't need to resort to something that extreme. It's probably one of the few things they could do in the US that would have the federal government step in and kick their ass in court.
But the reality is that there is just nothing to stop a bunch of ignorant, short-sighted, greedy fools in some third world country from buying these antibiotics and doing it. With the global supply chain, there's even incentive to try to do it for the export market. Unless industrialized countries are prepared to treat such shenanigans and the failure to stop them by the authorities of poor countries as an act of war or one legitimizing sanctions, there's no credible threat powerful to stop it.
This is why you want to avoid using anti-bacterial soap, sprays, and aerosols unless it's absolutely necessary.
I'm still only 29, so I guess I have yet to need them, but I've taken anti-biotics once in my life and can't help but feel a tad angry at the misuse which could potentially cause my death one day.
All that effort and in 10 years, humanity goes bye-bye.
Good Luck America.
Antibiotics are not fed to animals solely as a precaution. Animals that are fed antibiotics gain more weight, faster. This works on people too. Feed people antibiotics and they gain weight.
California, in the USA, recently banned such agricultural use of antibiotics and so have some countries in Europe.
It really is as someone said, greed/lust for profits/need to compete with others using antibiotics is the real reason why resistance is showing up.
-PM
Dead from antibiotics resistant bacterial infections. 3,000 people died in 9/11 in one particular year.
USA spent $2T on subsequent wars.
So it seems that $100T is "justified" in spending to combat antibiotic resistance, right? (Frankly, I'd be happy to see $20B increase.)
And it pretty much has to be Government supported investment, the market case just isn't there for a drug company to develop new antibiotics. How do you make your billions back from a drug which people just take for a little while, while they are sick?
Drug companies just want to develop drugs that make them lots of money, drugs that people will take every day or will take in huge quantities. So if a drug company DOES develop an antibiotic, they'll soon sell it for agricultural use to help animals gain weight--that's the only way they can ever make money.
Free market economics pretty much dictate that antibiotics will be misused if developed at all, that is why we have to have PUBLIC investment in new antibiotics.
-PeterM
Replacing antibiotics with proteins and possibly phage is a doomed proposition if done as a simple substitution. The advantage that antibiotics have that proteins can never match is they are low molecular weight chemicals. thus you don't have to give someone a high mass dose, it can be absorbed in the gut or membranes, and it can get into cells. Furthermore proteins are relatively easy to decompose without inventing any custom hardware, they are also easy to recognize specifically (which is also why they can provoke an immune response if not properly humanized). Thus proteins are not substitutes and start out with many many orders of magnitude handicap in molecular weight and accessibility. Therefore to overcome that one needs to exploit protein therapies in different ways. proteins are good at things like catalysis. The intital activity of a chemical is stochiometric in which one chemical binds one receptor. But an enzyme can turn over many many reactions, so one can, if used right, have a manyfold activity. (on the otherhand, this advanage is not clear cut, since the receptors bound by standard chemicals may amplify the signal as well, and many desired targets medical for proteins will be stochiometric binders not catalytic enzymes). A big big advantage of proteins is their potential for specificity which will both diminish their side effects and could concentrate them into a specific target area. Imagine for instance protein therapeutic which only affected a certain pathogen and left the other bacteria in your gut alone. Finally, if the protein is large enough then it can remain in the circulatory system longer before the body removes it. But that also means higher molecular weight which can be bad.
Phage are even higher molecular weight. But they can reproduce. And presumably they might be tailored to only infect the bad bacteria as their host for reproduction. But they also might become antigens and your own body would clear them.
Both of these therapies have killer applications and are not to be dismissed. Their extreme specificty will completely change medicine even more than antibiotics did. But they are not in the near future any sort of replacement for antibiotics.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Sorry to say it, but "most industrialized countries" feed antibiotics to animals routinely.
There are only a FEW industrialized countries which ban this, notably in Europe, notably NOT in North America (though the Republic of California just enacted a ban.)
It's NOT just a third world practice! Routine feeding of antibiotics to animals makes them gain weight faster. Market win! Industrial farmers LOVE using antibiotics.
Your mistake was underestimating the force of greed-induced stupid.
--PM
Phage therapy is essentially the use of viruses against bacteria. This seems like a wonderful idea and quite specific against specific bacteria.
For antibiotics we often want something broad-spectrum, because it takes time and a lab test to determine what germ is causing the problem. Precious time and uncertain results from the lab test.
So right off the bat phage therapy is less useful.
I wonder right also if the human host would mount an immune response to the phages used, effectively defending the very bacteria that the phages were intended to attack. It's a foreign antigen, after all, even a virus, why WOULDN'T your immune system attack it?
So might it be the case that phage therapy would only work once on a given person, for a particular phage?
So I'm not sure phage therapy really would be an effective replacement for the antibiotics we used to have. Helpful, certainly, but of limited use, maybe?
--PeterM
Maintaining antibiotic resistance is costly, and populations of bacteria which are not exposed to antibiotics will drop the capability after a while or be out-competed by competitors without the baggage.
So maybe a world-wide complete ban on use of some of the older antibiotics that are now mostly useless would help? Bacteria resistant to those old antibiotics might become rare due to lack of selection pressure.
Then, after 20 years of rest, maybe those antibiotics could be rotated back into use, because they've again become useful?
--PeterM
Remember how it was being villified by certain luminaries as leading to "Death Panels"? And when certain folks tried to kill it for being "unconstitutional"? That's the level of sanity of the political environment it was conceived in.
And even now we get posts from people who somehow don't like it (for whatever reason) but who still shy away yanking collective health insurance from a couple of milion people. Couldn't be their sense of ethics getting in the way. They're not like that. Something to do with political fallout I guess.
For better or worse, the insurance companies are simply the privatised face of national health insurance. And privatised means "for-profit". Which in turn means "maximise revenue and minimise expense". Bad news for anyone taking out or trying to claim on insurance. Fair enough. So what's your alternative? Want to set up an NHS-style system in the US? Perhaps sen. Bernie Sanders will look on that idea with favour, but absolutely no-one else will. Also be prepared to be branded a Communist, Socialist, Atheist, Satanist, Jihadist, Terrorist or simply all-round Un-American. Just a warning.
You might want to think about imposing more regulation on those insurance companies. Such as more financial transparency. Or some sort of nation-wide re-insurance. Well, good luck with either idea.
Sorry but in the mean time the ACA is what we've got. Lets try to smooth out its rough edges while we mull over what to replace it with, shall we?
...but I gave up meat many years ago. So, *I* have not been contributing to the profits of the assholes that did this.
Some people try to do the same thing by only buying family-farm meat. I challenge that such people buy a lot more factory-farm meat than they realize.
If vegetarianism became a widespread trend, these assholes would go out of business so our antibiotics would continue to work well. Also, environmental damage (from the factory farms) would be hugely reduced, and everyone would be healthier.
But, giving it up is just too much to ask, regardless of the benefits.
Polymixin use in humans is extremely rare. Guess where this resistance is coming from? Veterinary use of prophylactic antibiotics to boost livestock yields.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
don't give last-resort medicine to farmers, keep it in highly controlled conditions only (like: only administer in hospitals)
Yes, sort of. But that turns out not to be a big deal (from the bacterium's point of view). Even when bacterial growth is metabolically limited, the increased metabolic cost of a couple of plasmids is quite small. Yes, mutations in the antibiotic resistant gene will essentially be silent and could be competed out, but with several hundred plasmids holding dozens of 'cassettes' of antibiotic resistance, this is a slow process.
So, this strategy does work to an extent but not as well as you would like and as soon as the antibiotic goes back on line, the problem restarts pretty quickly.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
For thousands of years silver was the antibiotic of choice. Unfortunately nobody can patent silver, so pharmaceutical companies opted for other methods of germ fighting.
According to sciencemag.org "Silver ions perform their deadly work by punching holes in bacterial membranes and wreaking havoc once inside. They bind to essential cell components like DNA, preventing the bacteria from performing even their most basic functions."
In particular a recent article reveals that dead bacteria containing silver ions cause massive death among neighboring bacteria creating a zombie effect. This exciting news for sick people will probably fail to impress the medical establishment because silver still isn't patentable or profitable. http://news.sciencemag.org/bio...
Recent studies of silver suggest that it is not as effective as some would have you believe. Again, who pays for those studies--the medical establishment--can you believe their conclusions? They begrudgingly admit that silver is harmless when used sensibly. Corporations in the US have only one mandate under the law--provide a profit for their shareholders. Is this the correct attitude for a medical institution?
...omphaloskepsis often...
Then you'll see some action.
Bomb the whole region, leave no bacterium alive.
Do it China, for the sake of the human race.
We aren't ready to be put in this sort of situation yet. Every other problem, we can deal with fairly easily. (besides maybe asteroids or the sun exploding)
This, this we can't. Not even with every brilliant mind working on it, it will still take a while to fix the issues with resistance.
If this does happen, and given the nature of the animal and bacteria in question, it will spread like wildfire on steroids, it will end billions before we find a solution.
This isn't even fearmongering nonsense, this is literally get cut die in a day scenario, pre-medical era.
God damn farming industry will be the end of us all.
What we could do is try to manually destroy those resistant strains by deliberately mass-breeding the non-resistant ones.
We have done similar things before, and the reverse, to get rid of some violent species. (like killing off some nasty flies for a less dickish form by making them sterile)
Of course, there is another issue there where we could end up creating other horrible things we never thought about.
Culturing can be pretty dodgy if not handled properly.
@DarkOx
It's very fashionable to shout about "our freedom back", almost as fashionable to omit any kind of reasoned discourse on how or why that would be the case. In addition (just check Wikipedia) there are few million people in the US who didn't have Insurance coverage before the ACA but who now do. That's a lot more than the odd ranter about "lost freedom". In fact ... your idea of "freedom" seems to have more to do with "don't bother me with any obligations" than freedom to actually do something. Sorry, but in today's society you simply do have obligations. There's no getting away from that, so best get used to it.
I find it funny that you moan both about and on behalf of commercial insurers. If major insurers can't make any money from offering exchange-compliant coverage ... but others can ... one might ask what the problem is. As in: do those major insurers perhaps have too much overhead? Are they expecting unrealistic profit margins? Is it really the case that no money can be made? If so, this is easily repaired: increase the subsidies. If you don't like that ... you can alway ssee about setting up state-owned Insurance companies. And besides ... as long as there are at least 2 commercial Insurance companies left, what's the problem exactly?
I like the bit about "terrible law that crushes peoples religious freedom". It sounds like a claim people make because it sounds pretty good at parties and on forums. Without having a clue about exactly what "religious freedom" is purportedly "crushed". If you have a clue, let us know what particular "religious freedom" that is.
Then the bit about "their freedom to do what they wish with there personal property ". I hate to break it to you, but being a US citizen means you're obligated to pay taxes. The legal basis of the ACA, according to the Supreme Court, hinges on Congress's ability to impose taxes. Your "freedom" to *not* pay taxes has been curtailed by a comfortable majority of the people ages ago. In addition: no taxes means ... no more USA. I personally think you'd have to wait a really long time for that to happen.
The only thing you might be able to cavil about is: how much tax and for what purpose. But that would require reasoned (and informed) discourse. Something I suspect isn't likely to be the response of your choice.