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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!!!!
My dad has an infection in his arm which is only being moderately helped by intravenous Cipro and Vancomycin. They've sent a culture to Mayo to see if they can find a better treatment option but at this point I'm more than a little concerned. This stuff is already happening. They really need to get their heads out of the sand.
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..."
We still know about germ theory, so we would still be sterilizing scalpels and tongs with heat or alcohol or whatever. And we have xray machines and anesthesia and all that other good stuff, so it's still gonna be way better than medicine in the dark ages.
Making new stronger antibiotics is only a temporary solution, bacteria will probably develop resistance to that too.
What's probably gonna happen is that surgery will become risky and very expensive. Everything in the surgery room will need to be sterilized extremely thoroughly, and you would need super air filtration systems like a CPU manufacturing clean room. Even then risk of infection will always be there. So you would only want surgery in life-threatening situations. No more nose job or tummy tuck or a hip replacement. If you have a bum hip, you're gonna be walking around on a cane or in a wheelchair like our ancestors did.
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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There's a point to be made here. The dark ages bit is hyperbole, the vast majority of what goes into you being healthy is prevention, sanitation, gloves, and not throwing your feces into the street.
A lot of people these days seem okay with returning to the dark ages in terms of science and learning vs religion anyway. And they don't seem very sympathetic to sick people either. Maybe instead remind them that before antibiotics, soldiers died of infections nearly as often as they did of battle. Right wingers still care about soldiers right? At least in terms of their health BEFORE they fight?
fun fact: many of these antibiotics are developed through public private partnership with your local schools and universities under nondisclosure agreements which prevent any of the research from being made public. these NDAs often have expiration dates as far far as 80 years into the future.
the fact remains that if and when the cloistered elite need access to lifesaving medicine en-masse, these drugs will be quickly made available. If the cure for Hepatitis C was any indication, you'll certainly gain access to these advanced new antibiotics as well...at $30,000 a bottle.
Good people go to bed earlier.
True, medicine would only be returned to about its state in 1910, or perhaps 1900. Operations, even minor ones, would be a bad gamble with death...even when the best choice. Anesthetics would continue to be known and effective, but any incision could be fatal. Perhaps UV could substitute for some antibiotic uses, and strong poisons could be used to swab down surfaces, and disposable gloves and clothing could minimize risk. And... But we're already doing most of those things, and bacteria still get through.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
If a college receives any public funds, than any research should be owned by the public. Any derivatives as well. Therefore, and/all penicillin based antibiotics should be profit-and-prescription free.
There's a point to be made here. The dark ages bit is hyperbole, the vast majority of what goes into you being healthy is prevention, sanitation, gloves, and not throwing your feces into the street.
Agreed! Having feces-free streets helps all of us, even those who don't need antibiotics. I think it's called turd-immunity.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
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 ]
Whenever I read a statistic like Consumption of antibiotics rose 36% between 2000 and 2010 I wonder what they had to do to boil it all down to one number. For all I know this is accounted for mostly by a single drug being administered to farm animals ? It sounds like a shocking number but it means very little to me. Even a little more information would have been really helpful and help me feel like it wasn't a statistic created for wanton shock value.
Nullius in verba
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.
Politicians care about themselves and their ability to remain in power. If they can kill soldiers and remain in power, they will do so. If they can ignore a health crisis and remain in power, they will do so. If they can drag their feet while pretending to address an issue, they will do so. If, however, an issue directly affects them, they'll rapidly act to address it.
To show that this hasn't changed for hundreds of years, I give you The Great Stink of 1858. (WARNING: Do not watch while eating.)
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
And, what's worse, the enemy outnumbers us, is stealthy enough that you don't know you've been hit by them until after the fact, and can oftentimes adapt to render our defenses/attacks useless. It's like we're fighting miniature Ninja Borg.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Socialists will happily tell you that drug development is actually a government enterprise.
We spend a great deal of money on new drug development. A bit less than half is basic research funded by the government. The larger portion is the final development process required to create an actual product. Private enterprise handles that.
The final push to market is both extremely risky and extremely expensive. If you gut private economic incentives, you will be slitting your own throats.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
What we urgently need to do is to learn to let people die.
On a global scale, the use of antibiotics is more of a problem than the shit we use them against.
Humans are just a phase.
Skinner: Well, I was wrong. The predatory bacterial strains are a godsend.
Lisa: But isn't that a bit short-sighted? What happens when we're overrun by predatory bacterial strains?
Skinner: No problem. We simply unleash wave after wave of Chinese needle snakes. They'll wipe out the predatory bacterial strains .
Lisa: But aren't the snakes even worse?
Skinner: Yes, but we're prepared for that. We've lined up a fabulous type of gorilla that thrives on snake meat.
Lisa: But then we're stuck with gorillas!
Skinner: No, that's the beautiful part. When wintertime rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death.
While this will be a tragic turn of events for millions or even billions of people, ultimately we will be forced to seek a new path of technology to sustain our bad behavior. As they say, "necessity is the mother of invention". It will be a long hard road but we will reach the end and develop something akin to synthetic microbes that do exactly what they are programmed to do. Frankly, with the last few centuries so focused on killing each other, humanity could use the diversion to actually work on protecting ourselves from the ever-present invisible enemies that are microbes.
It's a hard road we face but after much death and suffering we will come out stronger as a species.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
but not for the reasons you're probably thinking. Those words weren't uttered by a government agent (one of those paid for my kid's cancer treatments and the research that made those treatments possible). They come from a right wing think tank. They were engineered to make the working class turn on each other and on the primary source of organized power they possess: Democracy.
Worked too.
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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).
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
Once again, we've let our perverted obscession for profits to override self-preservation of the species. The downfall of using capitalism as the only tool of economics.
PlaynBass