Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

pbs.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 414 posts

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

#321

Post by has2k1 »

alexandros wrote: post #168
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…

Thinking about the ideas you bring up.. it seems we humans have been playing on the same level as the bacteria upto now. Greedy algorithm vs greedy algorithm. Could we perhaps use certain antibiotics that will force bacteria to evolve in a way that opens up a certain weak spot which we will then allow to spread through their population before we step in and wipe them out using this forced back-door? This simple 1-2 p…

Good luck trying to convince people to accept the inherent sacrifice required in the short term. On the other hand, pugilists do understand the need for setups and combinations.

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

#322

Post by ronaldx »

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…

I don't see why we can apply these words and ideas to humans but not to bacteria.

Our feelings (wants) and actions are a result of evolution just the same as bacterial action.

We may choose not to ascribe feelings to bacteria, but the origin of the motivation is precisely the same as it is in humans - the motivation to survive and reproduce is universal to organisms.

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

#323

Post by gurtwo »

I wonder, what should we do as individuals? Shall we refuse to take prescribed antibiotics for "minor" things, and let the body heal itself at the cost of some extra discomfort? Would that make any difference in the long run? Does the resistance apply to any kind of antibiotics?

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

#324

Post by evacuationdrill »

evanmoran wrote: post #273
grecy wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course, they're given to animals to keep them healthy enough so we can eat them. If you cut back on keeping them healthy, you're cutting the amount of food available for human consumption. I recently re-read the fantastic Ishmael[1] which does a fantastic job of explaining the crazy things we've done to increase our food supply in the last 10,000 years. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishmael_%28novel%29

Choosing between vegetarianism and pandemic isn't a hard choice=).

But I'm glad we don't have to make it.

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

#325

Post by evacuationdrill »

marcosdumay wrote: post #292
erichurkman wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Maybe the solution is to have the procedure in a place that is a hospital. You'd want some environemnt that isn't shared by other sic people, and is only sporadically sterilized. Yep, I have no idea how to actualy do that. There are all kinds of issues, but I'd guess that you can solve nearly all of them with tech.

Like a surgery center? They do have those.

I worked at a hospital for awhile, and one of the things I found interesting, though, is that the departments balance each other out. For example, our hospital did obstetrics more as a service to the community, since other hospitals were much further, but they always lost money on it. So maybe the reason we don't see surgery centers or things like that as often is that medical institutions are more stable providing a broader range of services.

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

#326

Post by evacuationdrill »

saalweachter wrote: post #67
w4 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This, right here, is the biggest issue. Routine, minor surgery? No longer a risk free proposition. This sort of antibiotic resistance will have, and is having, enormously deleterious effects on the kind of basic health care and medical science we take for granted.

Fun fact: modern plastic surgery -- including purely cosmetic, non-normative surgery -- predates both antibiotics and anesthetics.

That's not too surprising. People sometimes have ugly face moles and stuff, and it's not too hard to cut it off.

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

#327

Post by enraged_camel »

gnaritas wrote: post #317
FkZ wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inability to understand figurative language seems a common malady on certain parts of the internet.

It's not an inability to understand you're seeing, it's a rejection of it because it misleads people. Pendants attack such language precisely because it's misleading without cause. There's no reason to personify random processes and doing so actively misleads people.

There is no "active misleading." On the contrary, the usage of the word "desire" in this context aids layman understanding of the subject.

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

#328

Post by triplesec »

Can anybody outline what possible justification there is for the continued use of antibiotics not as disease cure, but as prophylaxis and growth promoters in intensive farming? I heard about the stupidity of this as a child, from competent medical professionals, and decades on, nothing has changed. Rather than such socially rapacious short-sighted practices, we ought to be legislating better farming practices and tighter controls on these precious medicines.

I believe this is quite likely a worse issue than the other problem: the blatant overprescription of antibiotics by weak and obsequious family doctors looking to defend themselves from lawsuits and approbation from wealthy and stupid patients with colds and coughs, which has also accelerated resistance.

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

#329

Post by Peaker »

sliverstorm wrote: post #202
narrator wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Desire" implies that the bacteria is acting purposefully and planning ahead. This isn't what's happening unless you attribute the bacteria's activity to some sort of intelligence. On the contrary, we eliminated smallpox which was one of the most devastating diseases in history so this fatalism is basically disproved. More depressingly, we've also made extinct thousands of species who have not evolved to resist us.

we eliminated smallpox which was one of the most devastating diseases in history so this fatalism is basically disproved Smallpox was not eliminated with antibiotics, and nor was polio. Both are viruses, and both were eliminated with vaccines.

That comment digressed to discuss whether or not evolution plans ahead and "eventually discovers ways to overcome" as implied by the OP. Keep up with the topic :)

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

#330

Post by artsrc »

waps wrote: post #270
tokenadult wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

General reply to express thanks for and respond to the several replies my first comment here received. First of all, I wrote in the original reply, "his warnings should be taken seriously," so I am by no means disagreeing with the quoted CDC expert about his general policy recommendations. Indeed, I am on record here on HN[1] saying that I'd like to see the United States follow the lead of the EU immediately in banni…

So much wrong with this post: > There is a testable prediction here of course: either bacteria outrun human antibiotic development or they do not. I'm confident that more bacterial lineages will be wiped out before human medicine is seriously compromised by natural selection of bacteria that are resistant to most antibiotics used in human medicine. Do a dumb test. Walk into your nearest hospital, I don't even want to…

> We lost the fight with viruses a decade ago. If you get infected with a deadly viral disease, like rabies, it's curtains. There's nothing any hospital can do for you except sedate you until you're dead.

The fight we have not yet one is the fight against poverty. Not many wealthy people die of rabies.

AIDS which was once fatal, is no longer, provided you can afford the treatment.

Post reply on HN