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Antidepressants help bacteria resist antibiotics: study

nature.com

121–130 of 139 posts

Re: Antidepressants help bacteria resist antibiotics: study

#121
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm pretty sure "bothsidesing" (aka Murc's law) is from the Bush administration, but don't know where to find evidence.

Was Occupy class-based? They were intersectional progressive/anarchist/professional activists, so essentially they were in favor of everything ever and habitually unable to prioritize. That combined with their official policy of not deciding what their demands were destroyed themselves pretty effectively. (They also had "progressive stacking", which was like an early form of DEI liberalism.)

Class-based leftism wasn't really popular till Bernie though.

Re: Antidepressants help bacteria resist antibiotics: study

#122
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.

Good insight. I went through a profound burnout in 2019 after I lost my digestive health and got low serotonin due to a combination of work stress, overtraining at the gym, dehydration and a finger of booze after particularly hard days. Also food sensitivities to legumes, nightshades and almond butter, which I wasn't aware of at the time. I just learned that 25% of people who get food poisoning go on to develop IBS.…

Your are sensitive to plants from the nightshade family and you take ashwagandha? Either your ashwagandha doesn't contains active substances or you are not really sensitive to plants from the nightshade family.

Re: Antidepressants help bacteria resist antibiotics: study

#123
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.

Good insight. I went through a profound burnout in 2019 after I lost my digestive health and got low serotonin due to a combination of work stress, overtraining at the gym, dehydration and a finger of booze after particularly hard days. Also food sensitivities to legumes, nightshades and almond butter, which I wasn't aware of at the time. I just learned that 25% of people who get food poisoning go on to develop IBS.…

> profound burnout in 2019 after I lost my digestive health and got low serotonin due to a combination of work stress, overtraining at the gym, dehydration and a finger of booze after particularly hard days. Also food sensitivities to legumes, nightshades and almond butter, which I wasn't aware of at the time

Ashwagandha is a nightshade, so you likely weren't allergic to nightshades if it helps.

Also, I'm not sure how you concluded that you have "low serotonin" due to gut issues. Serotonin in the gut doesn't migrate to the central nervous system. It serves different purposes throughout the body, but the synthesis in your brain remains local to the brain.

There are a lot of unrealistically specific claims in your post about cortisol and serotonin, but it's impossible to make such specific diagnoses. You might be reading too much into the alternative medicine world that misuses surface-level knowledge about hormones and neurotransmitters to provide false comfort. Real medical diagnoses aren't so specifically centered on singular chemicals.

Re: Antidepressants help bacteria resist antibiotics: study

#125
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.

Exactly. And as long as antibiotics are produced in factories where the left overs are just sent into the drain as well (see India, China), anything else it just a tip of the iceberg. We need true emergency antibiotics - not once that are produced the way they are produced and not once that can still be used for animals.

I misunderstand your last sentence: what good is an antibiotic not useful on animals, given that we are animals?

Re: Antidepressants help bacteria resist antibiotics: study

#126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whenever someone says that the reason some health related thing isn't being used because it's not patentable and there's no money in it it's a pretty sure signal they don't know what they're talking about. Therapy methods, manufacturing methods, etc. are all patentable. As an example here is a patent that was granted around methods for selecting bacteriophages against specific bacteria [1]. If you search patent recor…

Yes, I don't know what I'm talking about. As I said I went into a rabbit hole and provided a TLDR. But do these guys know what they're talking about? https://phage.directory/capsid/phage-patentability You may have heard through the grapevine that “phages can’t be patented”, and yet, several phage patents exist, and biotech and pharma are starting to invest in phage-based therapeutics. What’s the deal? [...] However,…

I think they might not. I will grant I'm not an expert in this area, but I did read the cited paper. It's a paper from a law student published in the universities law journal. Maybe he knows what he's talking about, but I would put my money on the patent attorneys filing and being granted all the phage therapy patents. It was also published in 2019 and a lot of phage related patents have been granted since then. Is the patent office just unaware of the precedence cited in the paper? Are there any examples of phage therapy patents being challenged in court and not holding up?

Here is some info from a leading IP firm on the challenges around phage patents and how to address them when filing [1]. As they pretty clearly point out there are some challenges, but creating defensible patents in this area can be and is done. These companies can pretty much always find a way to create a defensible patent if they want to.

[1] https://www.nixonpeabody.com/insights/alerts/2021/03/03/pate...

Re: Antidepressants help bacteria resist antibiotics: study

#127
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ve…

Oh that's very interesting. So the problem isn't just finding a way to gum up the /single/ cell wall production process that is common across all bacteria species-- it's doing it in a way that targets some commonality between the many such mechanisms that differ per species, across all relevant species. And I suppose that between species this difference can be non trivial. Literally 4D chess and we don't even know wh…

Yes, exactly. For example, Gram positive and Gram negative bacteria have very different structures to their cell walls, and penicillins tend to be effective for Gram positive bacteria, but not Gram negative bacteria. There can be other considerations too. Rickettsial species, as an example, live inside their host cells, so you need an antibiotic that can penetrate into a human cell, which most antibiotics can't.

Basically, there's plenty of antibiotics that are effective against, say, 25% of the critical bacterial species, but very few that cover 90%+. So emerging resistance to any one of those few would be a very, very big problem.

Re: Antidepressants help bacteria resist antibiotics: study

#128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. And as long as antibiotics are produced in factories where the left overs are just sent into the drain as well (see India, China), anything else it just a tip of the iceberg. We need true emergency antibiotics - not once that are produced the way they are produced and not once that can still be used for animals.

I misunderstand your last sentence: what good is an antibiotic not useful on animals, given that we are animals?

[deleted]

Re: Antidepressants help bacteria resist antibiotics: study

#129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. And as long as antibiotics are produced in factories where the left overs are just sent into the drain as well (see India, China), anything else it just a tip of the iceberg. We need true emergency antibiotics - not once that are produced the way they are produced and not once that can still be used for animals.

I misunderstand your last sentence: what good is an antibiotic not useful on animals, given that we are animals?

Non human animals. Farmers feed massive amounts of antibiotics to their livestock. This used to increase their weight, but it’s no longer clear that this works.

Re: Antidepressants help bacteria resist antibiotics: study

#130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. And as long as antibiotics are produced in factories where the left overs are just sent into the drain as well (see India, China), anything else it just a tip of the iceberg. We need true emergency antibiotics - not once that are produced the way they are produced and not once that can still be used for animals.

Do you have any sources verifying the claim that these countries dump harmful chemicals directly down the drain without any neutralizing chemistry? Tragic and stupid beyond belief if this is true. Equivalent to using one's own kitchen sink as a toilet bowl.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41545-020-0051-0
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