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The Age of the Superbug Is Here

huffingtonpost.com

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Re: The Age of the Superbug Is Here

#91

Post by barrkel »

DiffEq wrote: post #66
DonaldFisk wrote: post #49

The 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.

Mutation + selection = evolution.

Evolution doesn't necessarily mean positive mutations that assist. See http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/misconceptions_faq....

Re: The Age of the Superbug Is Here

#92

Post by barrkel »

DiffEq wrote: post #82
DonaldFisk wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mutations occur in bacteriophage. Those mutant bacteriophage which can attack previously resistant bacteria are then selected for and become more prevalent.

Your assertion has never been observed with any certainty that could withstand normal scientific inquiry; not even this experiment gives such certainty: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._coli_long-term_evolution_ex...

The parent is talking about a virus; the wikipedia article talks about a bacterium. Can you explain further what it is refuting and how?

Re: The Age of the Superbug Is Here

#93

Post by livestockboy »

zdkl wrote: post #89
mercutio2 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no need to meet the current demand for meat. If meat was our only food source, then perhaps this syllogism you've drawn would be true. But in reality, meat is an inefficient form of producing food, with complements humans can easily shift to. So the way you get less antibiotic use in livestock in a capitalist decision market is by reducing the demand for livestock. Taxes do a great job at reducing demand.

Maybe my pun about meet/meat confused you but the problem definitely isn't limited to meat production. You should see the quantites of pesticides/fertilisers/treatment agents used in the extensive culture of plants. The question holds, if you don't intend to back current production levels that are only possible through over intensive exploitation to the detriment of the product and it's growing medium, what alternati…

Use of pesticides in plant agriculture is mostly driven by huge demand of meat/dairy industry for feed. GMOs also aren't exactly necessary if you don't have 90 billion mouths to feed every day.

There are some vegetables that are easily grown in unsuitable areas with GM, and some people do use pesticides and GMOs to "defeat" the market but if international logistics weren't so hard it would be easier to just import the stuff.

Similar industry, completely plant driven, is cotton agriculture for clothes - to ensure proper demand you need GMO or pesticides.

When it comes to beans, lentils, soybean for humans (although most of it is for fish farms, poultry and livestock), wheat, corn, rice, all sorts of fruits, pesticides come in hand, but there's more than enough if space was taken from dairy/meat and given to those.

91% of Amazon is cut for animal agriculture. http://www-wds.worldbank.org/servlet/WDSContentServer/WDSP/I...

It's just 7 billion people, while you have to raise 50 billion chickens, 1 billion cows, -- about 150 billion animals yearly just to get them from baby form to somewhat of an adult form. That requires a lot of food, way more than 7 billion avg. 150 pound humans.

https://xkcd.com/1338/

edit: realistically, this problem is unsolvable, just like US and China and others won't really struggle lowering their CO2 footprint, so will not Brazil, USA, India, Australia, Denmark and others when it comes to reduction of their meat/dairy output. If we were some nice unified Humanity maybe things would be different.

Re: The Age of the Superbug Is Here

#94

Post by aquiles »

rufius wrote: post #77
rm2889 wrote: post #68

I 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 antibiotic…

I'd imagine it's not much different in Central and South America based on my travels. You can walk into any pharmacy and show them the word "amoxicillin" and they'll give you a 2 week course. Edit: a word

it depends. i live in an okay-ish part of south america and if a pharmacy gives you antibiotics without prescription they can get arrested, so most don't do it.

Re: The Age of the Superbug Is Here

#95

Post by uptown »

The antidote to overprescription of antibiotics is to be able to get accurate test results to determine what to treat rather than throwing antibiotics at every problem. This company is working on products which dramatically decrease testing times to the degree that you can have actionable information before prescribing antibiotics:

Among some of the advancements:

* Group B Strep results under one hour (traditionally 48-72 hours)

* Salmonella results in 30 minutes (traditionally 24 hours)

* Listeria results in 5 hours (traditionally 18 - 24 hours)

http://nanologix.com/test_results.html

Re: The Age of the Superbug Is Here

#96

Post by snowwrestler »

zdkl wrote: post #64
livestockboy wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Antibiotics are not given to livestock to reduce loss. They are given to increase mass.

Farming without prophylactic antibiotics--where antibiotics are only used to treat sick animals, as they are in humans--could meet the demand for food easily.

Re: The Age of the Superbug Is Here

#97

Post by darawk »

I spoke to an MD/biochemist friend of mine about this issue recently, and was told that this really isn't that big a deal. Specifically that antibiotic resistance is usually a self-limiting trait, so bacteria that evolve that capability will quickly lose it when no longer in a hostile environment. So these 'superbugs' can be an issue in particular settings, like hospitals, but are unlikely to ever produce major global catastrophes, or spread much beyond those limited environments.

Can anyone else with more knowledge of this confirm/refute this perspective?

EDIT: I should point out he wasn't saying it was a total non-issue. Just that some of the fear-mongering about global pandemics and such was completely unfounded.

Re: The Age of the Superbug Is Here

#98

Post by snowwrestler »

zdkl wrote: post #90
crimsonalucard wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To the presses! I have discovered an alternative method of killing all bacteria on all forms of meat! It involves putting said meat under extreme temperatures thereby killing all microbes! I shall call this brand new method: Cooking!

I spy with my little eye someone who'd die early, in a world without antibiotics. Some contaminations can't be washed or cooked away (Staphylococcus aureus, some Clostridiums...). And there are a lot of ways to mess up and contaminate an otherwise perfectly fine sample.

You continue to post as though the only reason antibiotics are given to animals is to keep human customers safe. It's not.

> I spy with my little eye someone who'd die early, in a world without antibiotics.

This is a joke, right? People ate meat safely for thousands of years before antibiotics were invented.

Re: The Age of the Superbug Is Here

#99

Post by biesnecker »

gph wrote: post #71
biesnecker wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazing video. Question that comes to mind is how easy would it be to take the bacteria that make it to the center, and put them on a new plate with a different antibiotic in the same configuration, and then repeat until you've gone through all available antibiotics, then scoop that last batch up and do something really nasty with it? It must be harder than it seems, because otherwise why do terrorists and the like e…

>why do terrorists and the like even bother with (seemingly much harder to obtain, though admittedly flashier) chemical and nuclear weapons? What terrorists are you talking about? Seems to me like 99% of terrorists use regular weapons I.E. explosives, guns, and knives.

Fair point! I suppose I should reword it to say something like "why aren't we more concerned with this, at least as concerned as we are about chemical and nuclear weapons," but I guess "they're actually not that acutely dangerous that other comments have pointed to is the reason.

Re: The Age of the Superbug Is Here

#100

Post by DiffEq »

barrkel wrote: post #92
DiffEq wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your assertion has never been observed with any certainty that could withstand normal scientific inquiry; not even this experiment gives such certainty: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._coli_long-term_evolution_ex...

The parent is talking about a virus; the wikipedia article talks about a bacterium. Can you explain further what it is refuting and how?

The article focus, and my focus, is a about how or if there is actual evolution occurring within DNA. It is separate and apart from the organism in question. My point is that almost everybody these days mixes up evolution and natural selection when they are two very distinct things.
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