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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?
This is why you want to avoid using anti-bacterial soap, sprays, and aerosols unless it's absolutely necessary.
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
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
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!
The problem with this approach is that it gives no incentive to healthy people to get insured. With voluntary insurance, you will only get insurance when you're sick, and prices will skyrocket. Private insurance found their own way to force people into insurance, and that's called pre-existing conditions. You'd better get insured while you're healthy, because you will not be covered if you suddenly get sick. The only way healthcare can financially work is if healthy people pay for the sick.