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'Without Action on Antibiotics, Medicine Will Return To the Dark Ages' (theguardian.com)
Four years ago professor Sally Davies, England's chief medical officer, gave the world a sombre warning of the growing threat posed by bacteria evolving resistance to life-saving antibiotics. If this were left unaddressed, she argued, it would lead to the erosion of modern medicine as we know it. Doctors and scientists had long warned of the problem, but few outside medicine were taking real heed. Consumption of antibiotics rose 36% between 2000 and 2010, writes Ed Whiting, director of policy and chief of staff at Wellcome, a biomedical research charity based in London. He notes that much of the progress in the field is yet to be made: We urgently need new antibiotics. No new classes of antibiotics have been approved since the early 1980s. Between 1940 and 1962 about 20 classes were produced, but industry backing has decreased significantly since that golden age. The pipeline of new treatments is all but dry, the void fast exploited by resistant bacteria. A concerning number are now resistant to drugs reserved as the last line of defence, and the most vulnerable are in greatest danger -- the young, old and critically ill. Blood infections caused by drug-resistant microbes kill more than 200,000 newborn babies each year. The reason for the lack of interest from the pharmaceutical industry is simple: the economics don't add up. Developing new antibiotics is scientifically challenging, time-consuming and costly. The medicines we so badly need cannot be allowed to be sold in volume; they must be conserved for real need, with fair access guaranteed. This limits their retail value. Many early-stage projects will fail, making them a risky bet. Even those that are successful will take at least a decade to produce medicines that are safe for human use.
You've misunderstood "austerity". Austerity works as follows:
* We don't have the tax revenues to pay for half the programs the government wants to fund.
* We had been borrowing money for the other half.
* No one will lend us any more money, because we're clearly never going to pay our debt off given our spending history.
* We're stuck, no possible/I. way to keep spending at current rates
But, hey, maybe if we show lenders some evidence we're capable of spending less, cutting some programs we like, maybe they'll lends us at least a little. That's better than cutting half the programs to get back to tax revenue, right?
Austerity isn't some weird tickle-down economic theory or anything. It's what you do because you must, as for one reason or another, you can't print money to make up the shortfall.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Penicillin was discovered by accident, yes!
But the discovery itself was not obvious, and it was made by someone highly skilled, who had been trained and supported in decades of government science.
The discovery isn't even the most important thing, though. It was developed into a useful drug not by Fleming but by a chain of other people who were also supported by government science.
(Fleming was, as it happens, my father's supervisor for a time during the final stages of his medical training; he has told me in the past that Fleming didn't court the credit he has been given, and continued to credit where it was due, because the drug was actually mass produced through the work of others just as skilled as him.)
So you believe that a million years of evolution happened over night and now there are superbug boogeymen ready to eat you alive????
No, 75 years of bacterial evolution happened in 75 years. That's probably around 1e6 generations, a number which was sufficient for humans to evolve from rather primitive mammals, and it's certainly more than enough generations to to breed superbug bogeymen ready to eat you alive. (Certain bacteria were in fact always able to eat you alive, it's just now they've bred resistance to a handful of chemical road bumps we came up with.)
"Plus, the antibiotics given to animals are very weak so you're comparing apples and oranges. When we buy them by the kg, you're going to buy the cheapest thing available."
I'm sorry but you are wrong. Dead wrong. The cheapest antibiotics are not the weakest, they are old antibiotics that are very powerful and broad spectrum. Doctors have started prescribing other treatments not because they are "stronger", although you'll often hear that but because they are useful for a much smaller spectrum of infections which is called "targeted" despite not necessarily actually meaning more effective against that particular subset of bacteria. In reality, this is itself a way of fighting anti-biotic resistance, if you rarely prescribe broad-spectrum antibiotics then the bacteria develop resistance to a smaller class of drugs, there is little risk if they pass that resistance to other bugs that those drugs were effective against in the first place, and doctors can bust out the old drugs as needed.
If you look at the meds being used you'll see Amoxicillin. Amoxicillin is an extremely powerful and broad spectrum antibiotic. It's also dirt cheap because it was developed a long time ago. It was given out like candy for anything and everything until antibiotic resistance started being a concern and then doctors stopped prescribing it almost over night... Amoxicillin will still knock out almost any infection you could have. Which is why we save it in reserve.
And after over 20 years of 'struggling' with the EU, the US still have not grasped why the EU has an import ban on meat 'contaminated' by antibiotics.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Oh boy. You really just made up some shit about antibiotics didn't you? Full disclosure...actively practicing inpatient medical provider here with family practice background and infectious disease training. I prescribe antibiotics.
First off, Amoxicillin is very narrow spectrum. It is also prescribed incredibly commonly despite your claim to the contrary. It is one of the most common pediatric outpatient antibiotics specifically because of it's narrow spectrum of activity and excellent safety profile. It will not knock out "almost any infection you could have." It kills gram positive organisms almost exclusively. Since it is susceptible to penicillinase producing organisms, resistance is reasonably common. Further, it has no, or little, effect on most gram negative organisms because it acts on the components of the bacterial cell wall which are present primarily in gram positive only organisms. Calling it "strong" or weak implies a misunderstanding of antibiotics. While we often use "strong" to imply broad spectrum, any antibiotic is "strong" if it is used against an appropriate organism.
Your suggestion that the newer antibiotics are strictly narrow is flat out wrong. The newest antibiotics in common clinical use are the carbepenems which came into clinical use in the 80s and they are vastly broad spectrum.
The "old" antibiotics are not particularly broad when compared to the newer generations of carbepenems which we utilize heavily in the hospital. Some old antibiotics are narrow spectrum, some are broad. You're making a vague and unsubstantiated claim.
The only thing you are correct in is that you are right that we often prescribe narrow spectrum antibiotics when possible so as to avoid resistance patterns. But this isn't "strong" versus "weak" antibiotics, this is just good antimicrobial stewardship.
Or at least hold off until the actual subjects of TFAs have been discussed for a bit.
I'm getting really tired of scrolling past several screens of political non sequiturs to get to the actual meat of the discussion.
Yes, I know Carthage Must Be Destroyed. But at least Cato had the grace to wait until AFTER he'd made his points on the actual business at hand before he'd sign off with that.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way