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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”

#131

Post by bad_user »

felxh wrote: post #22

I 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…

It's very hard to get the phrasing right. There's always a certain amount of random mutation going on, which can lead to better fitness (or not). However individuals with better fitness end up reproducing more, so mutations that lead to such better outcomes end up surviving.

This coupled with multiple ways that bacterias can use to protect themselves against antibiotics, like enzymes, better shielding, or even pumping the antibiotics out, also increases the chance for successful mutations. And they've also developed this mechanism for spreading their DNA around to other bacterias.

The result is almost the same as if bacterias would have an agenda. Although it can happen for mutations to lead to worse fitness in contact with older and forgotten antibiotics. And it can also happen for these random mutations to drive a whole population to extinction. But these two outcomes have a much lower probability than bacterias becoming highly resistant to all antibiotics.

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

#132

Post by kephra »

nostromo wrote: post #53

80% of the antibiotics we use are given to animals.[1] That seems like a good place to cut back. [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/04/health/use-of-antibiotics-...

Antibiotics in animal farms should be banned world wide.

Unfortunate the only nation who has the power to convince others joining this ban, is one of the worst abusers of antibiotics.

Consumers might have a choice, if they are wealthy enough to afford it. If you are a beef consumer, eat beef from Namibia, where antibiotics for animals are banned, and avoid US or South Africa. Ask you butcher, if he can offer antibiotic free meat.

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

#133

Post by VLM »

TillE wrote: post #99
nikbackm wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, none of those (if you replace Y2K with Y2038!) are down for the count yet.

Tne real threat of a Dr. Strangelovian nuclear apocalypse certainly died with the Soviet Union, which isn't to say that such conditions could never arise again. And of course the risk of a smaller scale nuclear war is still very real. In each of these cases there seems to be a tendency to think that just because total disaster has not yet occurred, that the risks are nonexistent.

"Tne real threat of a Dr. Strangelovian nuclear apocalypse certainly died with the Soviet Union"

Why? Did the weapons magically disappear? That outcome is much more likely in the 2010s than the 1980s, for example.

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

#134

Post by DanBC »

tokenadult wrote: post #74
DanBC wrote: post #57

I've posted this before, but some people may have missed it. "Defeating the superbugs" ( http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01ms5c6 ) has a segment showing bacteria developing resistance to antibiotics. ( http://v6.tinypic.com/player.swf?file=24goih4&s=6 ) (Sorry about the lousy host; YouTube's content sniffing detects this as BBC property and blocks it.) They have a slab of nutrient jelly. The jelly has sections of di…

A good illustration. Your phrasing "The bacteria has developed resistance to the antibiotic" is of course better understood as "the descendant bacterial cells have been ruthlessly selected for resistance to this antibiotic." But that is not an invariant characteristic of bacteria. It is perfectly possible to completely wipe out a population of bacteria in a particular place so that the bacteria have NO descendants.

Thank you! I'll tweak the wording if I ever post this again.

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

#135

Post by ataggart »

stcredzero wrote: post #63
nostromo wrote: post #53

80% of the antibiotics we use are given to animals.[1] That seems like a good place to cut back. [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/04/health/use-of-antibiotics-...

In Denmark, they prevent infections in chicken houses by thoroughly cleaning them, then using techniques developed for clean rooms to prevent infections. In the US, we let them wade in their own filth and pump them full of antibiotics. We should just make it flat out illegal to use antibiotics across entire herds of livestock. We should also fine doctors for prescribing antibiotics to patients with a viral infection…

>We [sic] should just make it flat out illegal to...

>We [sic] should also fine doctors for...

Why is violence an appropriate response to these non-violent issues?

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

#136

Post by gte910h »

tokenadult wrote: post #70

The interviewed expert has very good credentials and clinical experience to be talking about what he is talking about, and his warnings should be taken seriously. But even at that, the fallacious teleological language he uses about biological evolution by natural selection suggests a way out of this problem. When he says, "Bacteria, like any living organism, want to survive," and "So anything that we do to try and ki…

Agency description language is easier for humans to understand than the passive language required to describe the actual occurrences.

Yes, it's inaccurate, but it is what often happens when you want to get across the message and can live with a bit of inaccuracy at the expense of message reach.

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

#137

Post by selectodude »

coolsunglasses wrote: post #47
mjt0229 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Norway did just that, and it seems to have worked rather well.

http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-205_162-6014559.html

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

#138

Post by mistercow »

tokenadult wrote: post #70

The interviewed expert has very good credentials and clinical experience to be talking about what he is talking about, and his warnings should be taken seriously. But even at that, the fallacious teleological language he uses about biological evolution by natural selection suggests a way out of this problem. When he says, "Bacteria, like any living organism, want to survive," and "So anything that we do to try and ki…

I'm slightly bugged by "desire" type language because it does actually cause problems in how laymen think about evolution. It's not uncommon to hear them make the mistake of thinking evolution will "think ahead". But the bigger problem I have with it is the "anything we do ... bacteria will eventually discover".

Some problems are just very difficult to evolve around, and it's hard to predict what they'll be even if you have a complete working knowledge of an organism's genome and biological workings. If the problem space doesn't contain a solution that can be climbed toward without sacrificing fitness in the short term, it is unlikely that it will ever be found by evolution.

Evolution is actually a really crappy optimization algorithm. The reason it has worked so well is not that it is so effective, but because it's the only game in town. It took evolution billions of years to make machines that can run 60 miles per hour. It took humans a few thousand years to create machines that run about 12 times that fast.

Bacteria work on a faster time scale than animals in terms of evolution, but five orders of magnitude? Somehow, I think we'll win in the long run.

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

#139

Post by JumpCrisscross »

"These are companies that are for-profit companies, and like you said, they have to answer to people. They have to develop drugs that will make money, and that’s not an antibiotic."

The profit motive is almost as blind a watchmaker as natural selection. We've built an environment which encourages bacteria to develop antibiotic resistance. Let's structure a pharmaceutical industry in which antibiotics are profitable.

The problem appears to be myopia. Antibiotics make money for a few weeks, chronic diseases for a lifetime. Fortunately, finance long ago solved the temporal shifting of incentives and payoffs. We need smooth the lumpy, often in-the-future, demand for antibiotics.

The government could tax the pharmaceutical industry, medical insureres, or the public. The proceeds would fund tax credits for the developers and/or producers of antibiotics. Alternatively, a more elaborate system by which health and life insurers incentivise antibiotic research, perhaps by issuing credit default swaps on pools of their reinsurance liabilities to antibiotic developers, could be structured.

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

#140

Post by ThomPete »

tokenadult wrote: post #70

The interviewed expert has very good credentials and clinical experience to be talking about what he is talking about, and his warnings should be taken seriously. But even at that, the fallacious teleological language he uses about biological evolution by natural selection suggests a way out of this problem. When he says, "Bacteria, like any living organism, want to survive," and "So anything that we do to try and ki…

I think its meant the same way that Dawkins talks about genes in the Selfish Gene.

I.e. they act as if they are selfish.

Blame this way of phrasing it on the limits of language.

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