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Dr. Arjun Srinivasan: We’ve Reached “The End of Antibiotics, Period”

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Re: Dr. Arjun Srinivasan: We’ve Reached “The End of Antibiotics, Period”

#4

Post by sailfast »

This resistance scares me a great deal, especially as a new dad. I'm hopeful that in the coming years we'll be able to target bacteria and viruses more specifically using nano-technology and other tools at a cost effective level (admittedly I don't have a lot of knowledge in this area but I'm hopeful.)

If all else fails, I guess we'll depend on the cycles of nature's adaptations and break out a new set of antibacterials every 50 years or so depending on the resistance trends we see crop up and hope we don't lose too many humans in the process. At any rate, I'm glad lots of smart people are working on this problem.

Re: Dr. Arjun Srinivasan: We’ve Reached “The End of Antibiotics, Period”

#6

Post by AaronFriel »

For the past half century, we should have been treating our antibiotics like weapons of mass destruction - tools of last resort only to be used in emergencies, with great hesitation, and only when absolutely necessary. The industry and the doctors responded: antibiotics were too profitable and the risk seemed too distant. Now we have no weapons; we're helpless and the world is again going to be a scary place where a cut or a scrape can land you in a hospital or in a mortuary.

For the first time in the memory of anyone alive today, we're going to see medical science step backwards. We're going to be more vulnerable tomorrow than we are today, and we did it to ourselves.

Re: Dr. Arjun Srinivasan: We’ve Reached “The End of Antibiotics, Period”

#7

Post by mmoche »

I remember hearing about Soviet research into phage therapy, where bacteriophages are cultured to consume particular strains of bacteria. I believe the treatment is only in use in a couple ex-Soviet states. Is this a reasonable avenue once we're essentially dealing with only MRSA-like infections?

Re: Dr. Arjun Srinivasan: We’ve Reached “The End of Antibiotics, Period”

#8

Post by the_watcher »

I'm hopeful this leads to new default treatments, since I have had allergic reactions to the last 3 antibiotics I have been prescribed. They do a great job fighting what they were designed to fight (for me), but then I get a week of a really itchy rash, cortisone shots, and cortico steroids.

Re: Dr. Arjun Srinivasan: We’ve Reached “The End of Antibiotics, Period”

#9

Post by bronbron »

> Another reality is there’s not much money to be made in making new antibiotics, so we saw a lot of drug companies who left the field of antibiotic development because of this combination of factors, that it was getting really hard to discover, to develop new antibiotics, and you don’t make a lot of money in selling these drugs, so the market really wasn’t there.

To me this seems like the big problem here. Antibiotic resistance is an inevitability regardless of our usage rates - there's too much selective pressure for it not to. To co-opt the Red Queen hypothesis slightly, we have to constantly be developing new antibiotics just to keep pace.

I suspect this problem will self-correct eventually, with the unfortunate side-effect that the cost of effective antibiotics will skyrocket for awhile.

That being said, we're obviously not doing ourselves any favors by dispensing them like candy, especially to the agricultural industry. It definitely encourages cycles - Effective antibiotics are rare and therefore profitable so tons of $$ goes into R&D -> Lots of new antibiotics are created -> price goes down because there's so many options/patents expire -> Overuse -> Resistance develops quickly and we're left with few effective options.

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