Gonorrhea Is Becoming Untreatable, U.N. Health Officials Warn

> Overall these theories provide a plausible and useful guide to the possible mechanisms by which a high-GI diet and dairy products can exert their effects in the pathogenesis of acne and can explain in part why people native to Papua New Guinea and Paraguay, living non-Westernized lifestyles, have no acne compared with more Westernized populations such as in Belgium (Table 2 and Table S1; see Supporting Information). However, they provide only the first step to understanding the link between diet and acne.

From http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/bjd.13462/full

From what I've seen, letting cows die or mistreating them is a much worse problem in small agribusiness.

This of course depends on local regulation and legislation. But at least over here (northern EU), the bureaucracy is heavy and requirements quite strong.

Large-scale farming units have internal processes and they have more resources; there are many people doing the work with more thorough official oversight. Small-scale animal care, i.e. family or single-person farms, may be dependent on one person only. When illness - particularly mental illness - or old age kicks in, the animals may be neglected or mistreated in abhorrent ways.

On the other hand, small-scale agribusiness is also where the best animal care can be seen, there is actually an emotional bond between the carer and the animals.

Bad care is eventually caught because when you can't treat your animals well, you won't do your paperwork either. However, it is a strain on small farms as there is a fixed overhead in paperwork that is not much dependent on farm size, so there's a lot more to do per animal on small farms and thus there is more work/cost.

There haves been increasing regulatory scrutiny given to the prophylactic use of antibiotic in animals (perhaps later than would have been optimal) http://www.fda.gov/AnimalVeterinary/GuidanceComplianceEnforc...

Some of the biggest challenges in antibiotics are economics not technical e.g., http://emerald.tufts.edu/med/apua/news/news-newsletter-vol-3... The only recent company built on antibiotics (Cubist) was purchased for a revenue stream and its R&D was disassembled by Pharma in the last year or so. You can bet that a good amount of organization knowledge has been lost. There are some start ups out there, but as far as I understand, there is little will to provide of equity or strategic funding for early development programs/companies. With the timelines in this industry, that doesn't bode well for 'breakthroughs' in the near future. With the recent idiocy and avarice of some of the "actors" in the industry (e.g., pharma bro, epi-pen). I am bracing for a backlash on pricing, even on needed products) which would further decrease the economic will for companies/funds to invest in early stage programs. Some comments here tout that the the wonders of science will solve this given time. Maybe so, but it's also possible that the burden of economics (and lowest-common denominator politics) could quench the wonders of science for the near term.

This is a category mistake. Treating bacteria (foreign pathogens of an entirely different species) and treating cancer (which are rogue cells belonging to individuals) are not the same thing.

What you're describing is the normal pharmacological approach to cancer treatment. Because these are the individual's own cells sharing the vast majority of its characteristics with normal, healthy cells, you have to go deep into the handful of mutations that occur that cause unmitigated cell proliferation (leading to cancer). These are targeted for treatment.

Bacteria are a foreign species and have all sorts of foreign biochemistry that can be taken advantage of. The health industry is not doing anyone a disservice by going after the low hanging fruit. Why climb through the 3rd story window when you can waltz through the front door?

Boosting the body's defense mechanisms could carry more risk that just attacking the organism. Boosting chemotaxis (WBC migration) to an area will increase inflammation which has it's own set of potentially dangerous risks. Sensitizing the adaptive immune system's to bacterial antigens runs the risk of autoimmune attack on similar-looking antigens in the host.

This isn't like D&D where you can take one point from "bactericidal" and put it into "immune boost." There are big systems in play and hardly anything can be reduced "one weird trick."

> Look at the molecular machinery of the Polymerase Chain Reaction which makes copies of DNA molecules

Antifolates, topoisomerase inhibitors, imidazoles, rifamycins are classes of antibiotics that target pathogen DNA/RNA synthesis.

> Not to mention the Ribosome which is the molecular machine in your cells which manufactures protein molecules https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ribosome

Aminoglycosides, tetracyclines, oxazolidinones, peptidyl transferase, macrolides, lincosamides, and streptogramins are all classes of antibiotics that target bacterial ribosomal units.

> And there is Reverse Transcription which converts RNA molecules to DNA molecules

Using reverse transcriptase pharmacologically would undoubtedly be dangerous, difficult, unnecessary, and ineffective. You'd basically have to engineer a virus that knows how to use reverse transcriptase that also targets the right pathogen and rewrites a portion of its DNA.

You should check out Nassim Taleb's "Black Swan"..