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Florida Citrus Trees To Be Sprayed With Thousands of Kilograms of Antiobiotics (nature.com)
Long-time Slashdot reader memnock quotes Nature:
In the next month or so, orange trees across Florida will erupt in white blossoms, signalling the start of another citrus season. But this year, something different will be blowing in the winds. Farmers are preparing to spray their trees with hundreds of thousands of kilograms of two common antibiotics to combat citrus greening, a bacterial disease that has been killing Florida citrus trees for more than a decade.
The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is in the process of allowing growers to use streptomycin and oxytetracycline as routine treatments, spraying trees several times per year, beginning with the 'first flush' of leaves this spring. Growers in the state could end up using as much as 440,000 kilograms of the drugs. Although the compounds, which are both used in human medicine, have been sprayed on other crops in the past and applied in limited amounts to citrus groves, the scale of this application has researchers and public-health advocates alarmed....
There is little publicly available science on the long-term use of these drugs in crop settings... Critics are particularly galled because there is also little convincing evidence that spraying will keep the scourge at bay.
One Florida public radio station reports that environmental groups have delivered a petition with more than 45,000 signatures to the EPA, urging them to halt the expanded use of antibiotics.
"The fear is an increase in antibiotic-resistant diseases for humans."
The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is in the process of allowing growers to use streptomycin and oxytetracycline as routine treatments, spraying trees several times per year, beginning with the 'first flush' of leaves this spring. Growers in the state could end up using as much as 440,000 kilograms of the drugs. Although the compounds, which are both used in human medicine, have been sprayed on other crops in the past and applied in limited amounts to citrus groves, the scale of this application has researchers and public-health advocates alarmed....
There is little publicly available science on the long-term use of these drugs in crop settings... Critics are particularly galled because there is also little convincing evidence that spraying will keep the scourge at bay.
One Florida public radio station reports that environmental groups have delivered a petition with more than 45,000 signatures to the EPA, urging them to halt the expanded use of antibiotics.
"The fear is an increase in antibiotic-resistant diseases for humans."
They want to create Superbugs.
You want antibiotic resistant citrus greening? This is how you get antibiotic resistant citrus greening.
The rise of super bugs is an issue for everyone.
I think they should go after the psyllid flies which transmit the disease. Psyllid are highly host-specific and usually only feed on a single kind of plant.
Perhaps they could do something like they did when Florida got rid of the screwworm (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochliomyia), or perhaps a genetic engineered fly like the projects to eliminate the mosquito.
The main problem with antibiotics isn't that we can't make new ones. It's still very hard to create new ones and see them through all the trials. The real problem is that the drug companies don't want to spend the money to do so because there isn't the money in it. Any new antibiotics are going to be used so sparingly that there won't be profits in them even when they will cost a fortune to use.
Even if they came up with an everyday antibiotic most people would take it for a week or two and then stop it. And if they managed to capture all of the common antibiotic use it would seem to be a huge market but people have to stop taking it for cases that are unnecessary. The real market for everyday antibiotic use is under 10% of the current usage.
I got that from a program from the UK I saw in which an infectious disease specialist went into an ordinary practice (office with multiple family doctors) and tried to get people to stop taking antibiotics when they weren't needed. If they insisted even after he spent the extra time explaining why they didn't need them he gave them a prescription. On his first day he managed to get a couple people out of around 30 to change their mind. He had much better luck when he brought in a machine to determine if the cause of the patients condition was a virus or bacteria. But the test took time and money that the practice wouldn't get reimbursed for.
Even now when people are demanding antibiotics unnecessarily the big Pharma companies don't see financial sense for bringing through new antibiotics that university researchers are finding, and they are finding them. I can't see how the companies will ever want to make antibiotics if society can get the message across to only take antibiotics when you absolutely need to. Governments are going to have to get together and create a fund to make sure that we have antibiotics in the future.