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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.
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..."
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 ]
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.)