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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.
help the POTUS to understand this!!!!
Oh... you mean markets cannot solve every problem on the planet?
Maybe if we spent a bunch of government grant money on the problem we could make it better?
Naw... the market always works... right? It's not like penicillin was discovered at St Mary's Hospital using government money.
Wait.... It was.
Another consultant who stuck it out.
"We are the Priests, of the Temples of Syrinx..."
new antibiotics aren't going to be profitable. For one thing the drug companies make plenty on the existing ones. For another they're too essential for life, so they're prone to price controls. We could make them profitable enough but only by allowing business practices similar to what Epipen's Pharma Bro did.
This is what "Austerity" and rampant non-stop tax cuts gets you. This is something the government needs to step in and do. The days of one bright guy with a petri dish making a major breakthrough are gone. It takes hundreds of years for that guy to get lucky and strike gold. In the meantime we've got millions dying. Said it before, say it again: For anything more important than a twinkie you need an organized response, i.e. the government.
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The worst part is, if a new antibiotics is discovered, it might help you right now, but after a couple of year, because of over use(*), the bacteria will eventually evolve some resistance against it. So the next patient with the same kind of infection will be again in the same situation...
Maybe time to dust off alternative therapies, like phage therapy ? (**)
Cue in citation of your favorite strategist (Churchill, Sun-Tzu, Machiavelli, etc.) commenting about the millennia-old proverb that the enemy of your enemy is your friend.
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(*) : over-prescription, industrial/agricultural use, etc.
(**) : phage are like viruses but specialize in infecting bacteria. So phage therapy is basically curing your sickness, by making your sickness itself sick, with its own sickness, in a kind of pathogen-ception.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Get the FDA out of the way, and dozens if not hundreds of new treatments will explode onto the scene in a jiffy.
You should have your dad make a trip to Lubbock, TX and visit one of the world's foremost wound care doctors: http://southwestwoundcare.com/
I used to work with him--he is very willing to use experimental treatments (that he has confirmed to work). Saved lots and lots of limbs.
First, get antibiotics out of agriculture, where they're given _all_ _the_ _time_ as a preventative measure. Stupid.
Second, why exactly should access be "fair"? TFA complains on moment that there's no economic incentive, and then promptly demands fairness. Get real. Life isn't fair. But what the rich can buy today will be available to the rest of us tomorrow.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Geezus, I keep posting this. Antibiotics are great and all, and limiting nonessential use is great and all, but we really need a Plan B. A serious alternative way of treating drug resistant infections.
And we already have it!
It is called phage therapy and it is completely different. Viruses have been attacking and eating bacteria for literally billions of years. This predates multicellular organisms and so we already know how effectively bacteria can develop immunity to viruses (hot tip: they can't! If they could have they would have done it a billion years ago).
Chances of the virus attacking and killing the host? Zero. Not close to zero, not almost zero, it's zero. Bacteriophages are 100% specific to their preferred bacterial victims. They won't even attack and kill familial relationship bacteria; it has to be an exact match or the virus will remain inert and harmless.
The Soviets pioneered the use of phage therapy and they are the acknowledged experts in this field. Western medicine has blinders on when it comes to the promise of phage therapy because it was NIH, it's not pharmaceutical, and monetizing it is problematic (it could be done but most believe it cannot be patented).