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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”

#341

Post by shabble »

tpainton wrote: post #338

This person reminds me of a lot of people I went to medical school with. Very smart, and yet, not very realistic. He outlines a scenario that is endgame.. when in fact, we are seeing cyclical events. We saw the emergence of penicillin resistence in S. Aureas, then methicillin resistance. we moved to quinalones, and sulfa and we see resisance develop there.. OF COURSE it does. The antibiotics don't cause resistance..…

> * We saw the emergence of penicillin resistence in S. Aureas, then methicillin resistance. we moved to quinalones, and sulfa and we see resisance develop there.. OF COURSE it does. The antibiotics don't cause resistance.. Natural selection is the process going on here.*

[...]

> When I hear people claim it was wanton use of antibiotics that caused all of this.. I wonder if they ever read a word about biologic evolution

Natural selection describes the shift in characteristics of a population due to some environmental pressure which favours individuals with specific characteristics. How they acquire those characteristics is largely immaterial, be it through random mutation, sexual reproduction, viral transduction, etc.

So yes, natural selection is the process by which the resistant bacteria outcompete the vulnerable ones, and thus become the dominant population. But the reason that occurs in the first place is because of the environmental pressure induced by the antibiotic.

Or am I missing something here?

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

#342

Post by refurb »

ronaldx wrote: post #319
refurb wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You pretty much nailed it in a very succinct manner. That's why it's so important to complete a course of antibiotics rather than stopping once you feel better. Once you've started antibiotics, you're basically enriching the population in bacteria that aren't affected by the antibiotic. This is normally a very small population, but if you stop half-way, the pressure on those bacteria from other bacteria (the ones tha…

This is an unconvincing argument to me - if antibiotic resistant bacteria survive, why would finishing the course of antibiotics make a difference? Does it clinically happen that stopping a course of antibiotics early causes an antibiotic resistant form of the infection? (I couldn't find evidence either way, but I did find a few articles saying typically prescribed course lengths could be safely reduced in the effort…

This gives a much better summary of the theory...

http://blog.oup.com/2011/11/antibiotics/

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

#343

Post by benrapscallion »

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…

When some established researcher say "this is impossible", that's a great experiment to do.

Examples: controlled release polymers, iPS cells, neurogenetics.

"Someone saying a thing cannot be done is liable to be interrupted by some damn fool doing it."

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

#344

Post by ctdonath »

kintamanimatt wrote: post #160
ctdonath wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the threat thereof that persuades compliance. If you try hard enough to do & keep doing something illegal, there is no limit which the state is unwilling to go to in coercing compliance.

Nobody's gonna beat a vet with a rubber hose because they gave a cow antibiotics.

If it's outlawed (as suggested above), he refuses to pay the fine, persists in doing it, and goes to great lengths to refuse subsequent incarceration, then yes he will face something akin to getting beaten with a rubber hose.

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

#345

Post by gnaritas »

enraged_camel wrote: post #327
gnaritas wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's your opinion, not mine; however it's exactly talk like this that has led to most laymen not understanding evolution. They don't get that it's being dumbed down for them and that's not their fault, it's the fault of people who casually anthropomorphize things because they wrongly think it helps to clarify; it does not.

Understanding comes from truth, not casual simplifying lies.

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

#346

Post by gnaritas »

jasonshen wrote: post #90
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…

You are completely right in that bacteria don't have the ability to "want" things since they don't have any kind of brain. However, desire is a useful way for the general public to understand what is happening. It's like saying "Water wants to flow to the lowest point of a room" or "The arrow wants to follow the path of least air resistance"

> However, desire is a useful way for the general public to understand what is happening.

No it isn't, it's misleading.

> It's like saying "Water wants to flow to the lowest point of a room"

Equally unnecessarily misleading. Water doesn't want anything, and before you claim people understand that let me tell you, they don't. It's a common belief that water has memory, there's an entire industry based on the concept and people fall for it. Walk into any grocery store and there are shelves of very expensive little bottles of water (homeopathy) being sold as cures for all kinds of things, it's disgusting.

> or "The arrow wants to follow the path of least air resistance"

Also unnecessarily misleading. Such talk may be fine among experts who "get" that's it's not accurate, but when talking to general public one should speak accurately, not loosely and "hope" they get it because the reality is many if not most don't and take what you say quite literally.

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

#347

Post by [deleted] »

mistercow wrote: post #293
resu_nimda wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. You come off as being dismissive of the power and beauty of evolution, although I don't think that's your intent. Evolution assembled the most complex system known to e…

Sure, but the main power and beauty of evolution is a direct result of the fact that it is an optimization algorithm. The fact that such an algorithm could just happen is astounding (although possibly inevitable, if universes are common and varied). If I come across as cynical about this, it's a response to the way evolution as a process has been fetishized by people who don't understand it. People look at the applic…

[deleted]

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

#348

Post by vacri »

ctdonath wrote: post #148
kintamanimatt wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not violence. They're not being beaten with a crowbar.

It's the threat thereof that persuades compliance. If you try hard enough to do & keep doing something illegal, there is no limit which the state is unwilling to go to in coercing compliance.

Nonsense. Jaywalking is illegal, I do it every day, and have done for most of my 40 years on this planet. The state hasn't yet seen fit to bother coercing my legal compliance in this matter. It's hardly going to unlimited lengths to stop this illegal activity.

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

#349

Post by vacri »

breischl wrote: post #248
dylandrop wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course, because if we make feeding antibiotics to livestock illegal, it can only be enforced by lynch mobs. C'mon. Do you really think every food regulation is being watched by military police who will come and beat you up if you break said regulation?

It's no secret that if you defy the authorities they escalate the amount of coercion they use. You just need to follow the progression far enough to get to the violence. They start with a polite court summons, then send a police officer to your home, and if you don't come quietly they'll physically force you. If you manage to resist that, well now you're resisting arrest so it doesn't even matter what the original su…

I think it'd funny that the libertarian definition of violence includes everything the government does, but it doesn't include their own 'social contract' stuff. "The right to swing your fist ends at my nose" - this requirement, for example, sounds nice and fluffily individualistic, but what happens if you violate it? You are taken to court, and if you continue to not comply, you go through the usual escalation of things. So using the same standards of proof, "don't hit me" is an act of violence.

The same goes for the requirements for a free market - which involves perfect information on the part of the purchaser. If you withhold information, you've violated the requirements... and if you continue to not comply, the system requires escalation, and libertarianism in particular relies heavily on the courts to fix things post facto, and of course, courts need to be able to enforce their dictates. So not providing perfect information to the market is an act of violence, using these flawed "chain-of-events-that-end-in-foo-are-literally-foo" terms.

The libertarian redefinition of 'violence' really needs to be abandoned.

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

#350

Post by Houshalter »

resu_nimda wrote: post #197
mistercow wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 y…

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. You come off as being dismissive of the power and beauty of evolution, although I don't think that's your intent. Evolution assembled the most complex system known to e…

It's still an incredibly stupid process. Sure it made it's way to the complex life forms we have today, but only after unfathomably huge amounts of time, and trillions and trillions of attempts.
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