31–40 of 414 posts
http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-67...
No more anti-biotics, for anyone.
Recently I had a wisdom tooth extracted. The dentist prescribed anti-biotics, but (unknown to him) I didn't take them. I healed fine. And so it was in the 20's and before that. Plenty of people survived and thrived before anti-biotics. And life will go on when we don't have them anymore.
No doubt these super bugs have had to give up certain advantages to attain what is (for their species) a very specialized survival mechanism. Which means that if we ease off of the drugs for a while, the bacterial populations will compete, and the less drug resistant ones will thrive. Then we can use our drugs again. Or that's the idea.
What I'd really like to see are the internal assessments of big pharma of these gram neg bugs. Why isn't it economically feasible to create new drugs for them? This article makes it sound like there is a large and growing market of suffering people who'd be more than willing to spend every last cent for a pill to make the pain go away. And if the prospect of people willingly bankrupting themselves for drugs doesn't perk big pharma's interest, I don't know what would.
I was wondering if resistant bacterial strain would drop resistances against one antibiotic if we stop using it for long enough. Maintaining a resistance comes at a cost for a living organism (synthesizing an enzyme), so the bacteria that would drop it would be promoted.
> Eventually bacteria will evolve, and they’ll adapt ways around that to overcome that obstacle. I am more optimistic than that. Sure: as long as antibiotic resistance is crucial for bacterial survival, bacteria have a natural need to evolve it. And, they will. But, this will come with a genetic cost to the bacteria. The reason that antibiotics work is because they are attacking some function that has deliberately ev…
>The reason that antibiotics work is because they are attacking some function that has deliberately evolved, through natural selection, to be like that. Antibiotic resistance must literally cost bacteria some efficiency in some of their other functions. I'm not convinced that there must be a cost; furthermore, I think it's unlikely that if there is a cost, it is high enough to be significant. Bugs evolve, but they do…
I think it's likely that those two claims are mostly true in bacteria. Since bacteria evolve quickly and have experienced a lot of evolution, I believe they are likely near-optimum and therefore the second claim (IMHO) follows from that: changes would typically be deleterious.
On the other hand, even allowing for that, it's possible we could be allowing them to escape a local maximum and reach a more-optimal state.
And, there is a more significant criticism you could make:
Even if I am right on both points, a population that evolved to be heterogeneous (with some small percentage of wildtype being resistant) could likely have the best of both worlds ;)
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?
It wasn't long ago that thread appeared about silver making antibiotics thousands of times more effective. Not sure where the thread is but the story here: http://www.nature.com/news/silver-makes-antibiotics-thousand...
MRSA was a bit of a wakeup here in the UK, but the main 'solution' was concentration on cleaning hospitals rather than developing new anitbiotics.
It is my opinion that unfortunately it will require high profile people to start dying before support is galvanised.
It would seem from the outside that HIV/AIDs started to be addressed when superstars like Freddie Mercury started succumbing.
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…
There have been plenty of those before you and there will be plenty more to come. Y2K, Nuclear War, Swine Flu, Global Warming, Apocalypse, take your pick.
I'm not going to watch the documentary to see the full quote, but taken on its face, this is a false statement. There continue to be many infections which will still be treatable by antibiotics for the foreseeable future.
Antibiotic resistance will continue to be a problem (obviously), but we're going to have effective antibiotics available to us for the coming decades.
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…
Now, if doctors were to use antibiotics only for very serious infections, a last resort method, then pharmaceutical companies wouldn't have had the incentive to develop even the drugs that we now take for granted, because the market would have been so incredibly small to not give them enough reason to invest in development.
I think we would've ended up in this very same position anyway, it was just a matter of time.