There's a pretty good Frontline about this...I didn't see this fact listed in the article, but another huge problem is that it's generally not profitable for big medicine corporations to research new antibiotics, which means that for the time-being, we're stuck with our current regime.
The Age of the Superbug Is Here
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Re: The Age of the Superbug Is Here
#62It is not difficult to make microbes resistant to penicillin in the laboratory by exposing them to concentrations not sufficient to kill them, and the same thing has occasionally happened in the body. - ALEXANDER FLEMING, Nobel Lecture, December 11, 1945
Sounds a lot like live virus vaccines introduced to humans. Weak enough not to kill us and then we develop resistance.
Improper dosage of antibiotics is like 'vaccinating' the microbes.
Re: The Age of the Superbug Is Here
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If the choice is cheap meat or antibiotics Easy to say when you're wealthy, no so much when you consider yourself healthy but poor.
Meat is a luxury.
Yup. I am an avid meat eater, love BBQ, all of the food I cook has meat in it- but I am absolutely aware that it is a luxury. I do my absolute best to buy higher quality meat as close to pasture raised as I can get... but I don't make that final leap to source out local farmers and buy directly from them to ensure that I know exactly how the meat I'm eating is raised.
But at the end of the day, not everyone can afford organic pasture raised eggs at $7/dozen. And the problem is that we've all gotten so used to eggs at $0.50/dozen or chicken at $1/pound that I don't think society as a whole could deal with the cost of meat equalizing to reflect the true cost of non-factory farmed production.
Re: The Age of the Superbug Is Here
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well the selection environment is a requirement to not getting sick from eating the products. You can't just have a nice chat with the microbe unions and ask them to behave and stay off the meat...
> is a requirement to not getting sick from eating the products one gives antibiotics to one's thousands of chickens to spur growth (body growth - gaining mass), not to protect the consumer from disease. giving antibiotics to poultry extremely increases mass gains. post-slaughter processes add chemicals that keep meat from rotting, eradicating some of those living harmful bacteria that just so happen to turn flesh in…
I entirely agree on your opinion of the antibiotic situation regarding large scale farming.
The problem is that we could not substitute another method to produce enough food to me(e|a)t demand. If we want to keep eating we must have safe food, and to keep food safe in frankly hostile environments we need to treat it. Until we can do without what passes for modern industrialised food growing and processing, we'll need treatments and colorants so we can pretend this is 'regular' food.
Re: The Age of the Superbug Is Here
#65It gives one pause to reconsider the social movement to get more people into dense "smart" cities.
"Superbugs" are most prevalent in hospitals.
Re: The Age of the Superbug Is Here
#66The article mentions phage therapy in passing, and links to this Nature article: http://www.nature.com/news/phage-therapy-gets-revitalized-1.... The Nature article hints that the main barrier to adoption is that it's difficult to for pharmaceutical companies to make a profit out of phage therapy: the cure is entirely natural, bacteriophage are the most common organisms on the planet, they reproduce very quickly, and…
You used the word "evolve" - I don't think this means what you think it means. Evolving means that positive mutations are occurring that assist these organisms; what is really happening is Natural Selection; where already present genetic capabilities are being favored and those populations are thus surviving.
Re: The Age of the Superbug Is Here
#67There's a pretty good Frontline about this...I didn't see this fact listed in the article, but another huge problem is that it's generally not profitable for big medicine corporations to research new antibiotics, which means that for the time-being, we're stuck with our current regime.
It wasn't profitable to research the old antibiotics either. They were developed with government money.
Re: The Age of the Superbug Is Here
#68I live in India and despite some improvements, the level of antibiotic abuse here is shocking. They're available over the counter and people self-medicate with antibiotics all the time. The attitude is, "if my sore throat doesn't go away in a couple of days, its time to take antibiotics. No point in going to the doc coz they'll prescribe antibiotics too and this way I save money."
People self-medicating on antibiotics end up taking an incomplete dose without fully understanding the implications. This has lead to the rise of superbugs like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Delhi_metallo-beta-lactama...
Re: The Age of the Superbug Is Here
#69The article mentions phage therapy in passing, and links to this Nature article: http://www.nature.com/news/phage-therapy-gets-revitalized-1.... The Nature article hints that the main barrier to adoption is that it's difficult to for pharmaceutical companies to make a profit out of phage therapy: the cure is entirely natural, bacteriophage are the most common organisms on the planet, they reproduce very quickly, and…
Each bacteriophage typically targets just one or at most few types of bacteria. The targeted treatment in many ways is an advantage because a phage treatment to target a pathogen wouldn't also wipe out the symbiotic bacteria that we are increasing finding act as part of our natural defense mechanism against pathogens.
The challenge for drug companies is that they would need to isolate and get regulatory approval for each pathogenic bacteria that they wanted to treat. Today one of the challenges that drug companies face with developing new antibiotics is that the profit models for antibiotics are poor compared to drugs that treat chronic conditions. With an antibiotic you sell one course of treatment per patient but with a diabetes drug , for example, you're selling a lifetime supply. With a phage your taking the already small pool of money for antibiotic treatment and dividing it by a hundred or a thousand.
The other challenge is that using phages as part of a treatment protocol the diagnosing physician would need to culture and identify the pathogenic bacteria and then order a specific phage for treatment which would increase the cost of diagnosis. One possibility would be creating cocktails of phages that would target many different strains of phages but that would require complex revenue sharing agreements unless all the phages were developed by one drug company.
And while phages work great in vitro the don't always work as well in vivo because they are ... viruses ... which the immune system will attempt to identify and destroy them. Phage therapy for a sore throat, for example, requires gargling a phages in liquid. Not as simple as popping a pill to treat a blood infection.
Re: The Age of the Superbug Is Here
#70easy solution is to just heavily tax dairy, livestock and other industries that produce hundreds of billions of bacteria testing grounds (animals) per year at the same time using last-resport antibiotics to spur growth and reap profits. or give extreme tax benefits to those that don't use antibiotics.
Any research you care to share to support your claims?