Okay, I'm sold, as a citizen, that this is an issue I and my child's generation will have to face. How can I help?
Refuse behaving like the average (ahem, mostly american) and don't ask for medicine for benign illnesses.
Dr. Arjun Srinivasan: We’ve Reached “The End of Antibiotics, Period”
41–50 of 414 posts
Re: Dr. Arjun Srinivasan: We’ve Reached “The End of Antibiotics, Period”
#42For 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 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. Perhaps most terrifying is that the mere act of hospitalization will likely be the highest vector of transmission of nearly untreatable infections. Go in for a routine procedure and end up in the isolation ward due to some highly infectious, deadly disease.
I feel a lot less silly now for avoiding medical treatment unless absolutely necessary all my life.
Re: Dr. Arjun Srinivasan: We’ve Reached “The End of Antibiotics, Period”
#43One of the best ways to combat the problem is to speed-up detection speeds of bacteria. Lots of companies are tackling this problem. One of them I've been following has made enormous progress in reducing these detection times.
They've reduced MRSA from 18-24 hours down to 6 hours. Salmonella from 24 hours to a 30 minutes. Mycobacterium tuberculosis from 21 days to 1.5 hours. Etc.
http://nanologix.com/test_results.html
Stopping these problems before they get the chance to spread is how I believe these infections will be slowed, as antibiotics become less effective.
Re: Dr. Arjun Srinivasan: We’ve Reached “The End of Antibiotics, Period”
#44I know the article tries to explain things in a way a layman can understand, but the wording when it comes to evolution is quite poorly chosen IMO. Saying thinks like 'Bacteria, like any living organism, want to survive' and 'bacteria will always change in order to survive', are just incorrect and will result in big misconceptions. To my knowledge, bacteria don't have an agenda, they don't want to survive and they ce…
I wouldn't be so hard on him. Teaching physics, we often find ourselves saying things like "the ball wants to roll down the hill". It seems to be natural to talk in terms of agency when trying to make concepts intelligible to the relative layman.
Re: Dr. Arjun Srinivasan: We’ve Reached “The End of Antibiotics, Period”
#45This is a really big deal, and should be getting more visibility. I think the good news here is it opens the door for a more targeted approach. Current antibiotics are a nuclear option, they wipe out the good with the bad. Thats very bad when a majority of the cells in our body are good bacteria that play a role in our immunity and health. You can see how this leads to a reliance on the nuclear option.
If this is the end of the Age of Antibiotics, I hope its the beginning of the Age of Probiotics. Working with the good bacteria and developing more targeted strategies of taking out the bad. Snipers, not nukes. (Im no scientist but perhaps learning from how good bacteria fight off bad bacteria is a good place to start) http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/03/100324094717.ht...
Re: Dr. Arjun Srinivasan: We’ve Reached “The End of Antibiotics, Period”
#46For 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…
I think you're going a bit too far there.
I could agree (or at least agree to disagree) if you were talking solely about agricultural use of antibiotics or just-in-case prescriptions, but it's a bit tone deaf to complain about people using antibiotics to treat non-emergency diseases (like strep throat and gonorrhea).
Re: Dr. Arjun Srinivasan: We’ve Reached “The End of Antibiotics, Period”
#47> 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…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasmid
"In nature, plasmids carry genes that may benefit survival of the organism (e.g. antibiotic resistance),"
Plasmids cost energy, they are dropped in the course of natural selection if they stop conferring an advantage.
More quickly than you might think, too.
If we stop using antibiotics, the bacteria will become less resistant.
Re: Dr. Arjun Srinivasan: We’ve Reached “The End of Antibiotics, Period”
#48Do doctors over-use antibiotics to save from being sued by patients in the case of an infection?
Re: Dr. Arjun Srinivasan: We’ve Reached “The End of Antibiotics, Period”
#49For 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…
> we're helpless and the world is again going to be a scary place
Whoa there. According to the article, we have few new antibiotics precisely because the old ones have been so effective:
>Infections are not that common compared to other types of conditions like high blood pressure or high cholesterol. [...] They have to develop drugs that will make money, and that’s not an antibiotic.
When we had lots of development effort put into antibiotics, there were lots of new antibiotics discovered. Expect that level of development to come back if / when infections again become a bigger problem than high cholesterol.
Re: Dr. Arjun Srinivasan: We’ve Reached “The End of Antibiotics, Period”
#50Meanwhile tons of antibiotics are used in factory farming. I'm not sure why it has ever been legal to use massive amounts of antibiotics on animals that aren't sick yet.