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Antidepressants help bacteria resist antibiotics: study

nature.com

51–60 of 139 posts

Re: Antidepressants help bacteria resist antibiotics: study

#51
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That last sentence is often used to criticize economics but haven’t heard it on harder “sciences” before.

Not to diss on OP's comment, but out of context it sounds exactly like what COVID deniers usually say.

The beauty if disinformation is that it includes nuggets of truth, or uses seemingly solid rational that is flawed in a very subtle way.

I am a pro conspiracy theory person. But to be clear, there was a ton of disinformation around COVID, and this thread has nothing to do with COVID. I believe COVID is real, and that the vaccines were a good idea.

Re: Antidepressants help bacteria resist antibiotics: study

#52
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to diss on OP's comment, but out of context it sounds exactly like what COVID deniers usually say.

That's exactly what I took from "(cough cough) disorders".

Cough cough was not a respiratory reference. I simply am not going to stir up the pot by directly mentioning the fields that are corrupt or the specific disorders.

Re: Antidepressants help bacteria resist antibiotics: study

#53
post #7

I wonder if antidepressants protect your gut microbiome and the SSRI aspect is over stated. Would be very hard to disambiguate those two effects I suspect.

But SSRIs reverse depression symptoms, they don't prevent it from happening in the first place. so the mechanism would have to be not just protection but some kind of restoration or rebalancing, maybe by selectively protecting some bacteria but not others. That seems a little less plausible to me.

SSRIs do lower the risk of further depressive episodes.

"To conclude, this review provides evidence that continuing SSRIs for 1 year reduces risk of MDD and relapse."

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5761909/

Re: Antidepressants help bacteria resist antibiotics: study

#54
post #4

Interesting and potentially dangerous. But as long as many millions of pigs are covered in antibiotic foam (which is just rinsed off into the drain), I'm not gonna lie sleepless over this. Resistant bacteria will cause humanity huge troubles if we don't manage to do something radical soon.

The answer is phages. But last time I went into the rabbit hole the TLDR was that it is not patentable so there's no money in it. And everyone needs a different phages cocktail. I sleep at night knowing that push come to shove someone will step in and mass produce machines to create personal phage cocktails.

> I sleep at night knowing that push come to shove someone will step in and mass produce machines to create personal phage cocktails.

Drug resistant bacteria are here. Hasn't push already come to shove?

Phages are interesting, but given that there are substantial challenges on the road to making and administering them (and you can be in a race against the clock as someone's infection progresses), shouldn't we also be trying to use existing antibiotics far more strategically?

Re: Antidepressants help bacteria resist antibiotics: study

#55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Factory farm companies have known that anti-biotics, hormones, and pesticides are causing increased rates of cancer and other (cough cough) disorders This may be true in specific cases... But surely isn't true in general. It's the role of science and government to find out which anti-biotics, which hormones, and which pesticides case increased rates of which cancers. As soon as there is evidence suggesting a specif…

> It's the role of science and government to find out which anti-biotics, which hormones, and which pesticides case increased rates of which cancers. Not if you subscribe to the precautionary principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precautionary_principle "The principle is often used by policy makers in situations where there is the possibility of harm from making a certain decision (e.g. taking a particular course o…

But imagine how much revenue we'd be missing out on if every new invention that could shave a few cents off the bottom line had to be researched first?

Just one of many brilliant decisions that the primarily white men who have ran this country throughout history made on behalf of all of us. Without our consent, of course.

Good luck proving your dad's colon cancer was caused by industrial solvents in our water supply. Call your congressman! It's a democracy!

Re: Antidepressants help bacteria resist antibiotics: study

#56

Factory farm companies have known that anti-biotics, hormones, and pesticides are causing increased rates of cancer and other (cough cough) disorders in the same way big oil knew that it was contributing to/causing global warming. Every person in the comments across the internet saying the rise in all of these disorders was just about self-reporting have been unknowingly shilling for big food. Being anti conspiracy a…

> increased rates of cancer and other (cough cough) disorders

Can someone translate dogwhistle to english here please?

Re: Antidepressants help bacteria resist antibiotics: study

#57

I’m a bit confused why antibiotic resistant bacteria is so scary. My layman understanding is that antibiotics gum up the mechanism to produce the cell wall. Sure, bacteria may develop where the mechanism works a bit differently and is not affected by a certain chemical. But it seems like “disrupt cell wall production” is a huge target and we could probably disrupt it in many other ways. Humans lack a cell wall entire…

This is a very good question. The practical issues with antibiotic resistance may not be that obvious to a layperson because they tend to pop up in the hospital setting as opposed to the clinic setting that most people are familiar with.

The antibiotic bottleneck centers around patients who show up to the hospital with very vague signs of infection (fever, sweats, rigors, lethargy, etc.) and are sick. Like on the verge of going to the ICU sick. Or already in the ICU sick. These people need an effective antibiotic and they need one fast. You don't have the luxury of sending a culture to the lab and waiting for the antibiotic susceptibility profile to come back because that can take multiple days. So you need a toolbelt of "broad spectrum" antibiotics that are highly effective against the dozen or so bacteria that are the most common culprits of serious infection - something that you can use in the critical first 48 hours, while you're still waiting for culture results.

In practice (at least in the US), your selection of broad spectrum antibiotics is limited to vancomycin plus either cefepime or combination piperacillin/tazobactam. That's it. There really aren't very many other antibiotics that are effective against a sufficiently wide range of bacteria. We do have "back up" antibiotics to use if those fail, but these are powerful agents that come with some really nasty side effects, like seizures (for carbapenems) or widespread muscle breakdown (for daptomycin). And they are pretty limited in number too.

If vancomycin, cefepime, or piperacillin/tazobactam resistance starts to become a lot more common before the next generation of antibiotics comes in, we're screwed. And antibiotic development has been stuck in a rut for decades.

Re: Antidepressants help bacteria resist antibiotics: study

#59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone has an agenda.

I'm not sure if this is a corollary or a counterpoint to what you're trying to say here, but not all agendas are equivalent. One person's agenda might be to make as much money as possible irrespective of consequences. Another person's agenda might be to decrease asthma rates. The fact that both people have some kind of agenda is basically irrelevant. This is the same hole as in the classic "both sides" political atti…

The Democrat party drummed up the "both sides" argument as cover for them turning their backs on the grassroots activism that got Barack Obama elected in 2008. In the same way, the modern focus on racial issues in the US is directly correlated with quelling the anti-classist Occupy movement.

The lesser of two evils is still evil.

Re: Antidepressants help bacteria resist antibiotics: study

#60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The answer is phages. But last time I went into the rabbit hole the TLDR was that it is not patentable so there's no money in it. And everyone needs a different phages cocktail. I sleep at night knowing that push come to shove someone will step in and mass produce machines to create personal phage cocktails.

Phages are not the silver bullet that people think they are. First they're difficult to make and store (antibiotics are mostly shelf stable... phages aren't). Second, they are not broad spectrum. Third, (at least in the US) phage therapy hasn't taken off because the initial forays into phages showed that they can cause reactions. Lastly, not all bacteria have phage counterparts. So if you even could use phages, you'r…

They're highly specific, and are harder to administer. They're usually stored in glass phials which need to be kept in a refrigerator. Stomach acid needs to be neutralized if they're taken orally. If administered by injection, the strain used can only be used once as the body develops antibodies to it. Most of the scientific literature on them is in either Georgian or (if you're lucky) Russian.

They're not without their problems, but there are also problems with antibiotics (bacterial resistance, penicillin allergy). So why not use them whenever use of antibiotics is problematic? They're cheap, and reproduce at a phenomenal rate. They were used successfully in the Soviet Union, and are still being used in Georgia.

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