But how do you fix antibiotics abuse in other countries? Antibiotic resistant bacteria are spreading a lot faster in Russia, Pakistan, India, South East Asia and Latin America. And with international tourism growing it is just a matter of time before it reaches everywhere in the world.
The case for an antibiotics tax
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Re: The case for an antibiotics tax
#22There was recently an interview posted here on HN about the end of antibiotics (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/health-science-techn...). In short, the interviewee Dr. Arjun Srinivasan was pleading for a serious conversation about what to do to further regulate their usage, because some bacteria are developing increased resistance to most, if not all, antibiotics available. What's stunning to me about all these articles is that, after all these alarms have been raised and as all the people responsible seem to be contemplating solutions to regulate antibiotic usage, nobody's mentioning alternative methods to fight bacteria. Following the afore mentioned article one commenter remarked that Dr. Srinivasan did a great job or spooking us, but there was absolutely no mention of bacteriophage during the interview, which got me curious. Turns out phage therapy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phage_therapy) has been used successfully for close to 100 years in Russia and Georgia. According to this Wikipedia page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacteriophage
Phages were discovered to be antibacterial agents and were used in Georgia and the United States during the 1920s and 1930s for treating bacterial infections. They had widespread use, including treatment of soldiers in the Red Army. However, they were abandoned for general use in the West for several reasons:
- Medical trials were carried out, but a basic lack of understanding of phages made these invalid.
- Phage therapy was seen as untrustworthy, because many of the trials were conducted on totally unrelated diseases such as allergies and viral infections.
- Antibiotics were discovered and marketed widely. They were easier to make, store and to prescribe.
- Former Soviet research continued, but publications were mainly in Russian or Georgian languages, and were unavailable internationally for many years.
- Clinical trials evaluating the antibacterial efficacy of bacteriophage preparations were conducted without proper controls and were methodologically incomplete preventing the formulation of important conclusions.
Their use has continued since the end of the Cold War in Georgia and elsewhere in Central and Eastern Europe.
I am wondering then, if we have to have these "serious conversations" about regulation of antibiotics for the sake of the threat posed by over-consumption, how serious can it really be if we have to wear blinders and continue to pretend that what the Russians and Georgians have been doing is utter sorcery?
Re: The case for an antibiotics tax
#23> The agency is asking the makers of animal drugs to voluntarily alter their labels so that farmers can no longer buy antibiotics to promote animal growth (a fairly common practice).
I was under the impression that growth is secondary to supplementing the animal's immune system, especially since factory farms are terribly unsanitary.
Re: The case for an antibiotics tax
#24This is a great idea. The point of a tax is to impose penalties that exist in real life, but are not part of the original transaction: externalities. Widespread use of antibiotics has a cost associated with it that must be paid by someone, and it should be part of the price of antibiotics. Much like there's a cost associated with income inequality, so we tax the rich more to supposedly cover that cost. Costs associat…
> Much like there's a cost associated with income inequality, so we tax the rich more to supposedly cover that cost. That's a fairly disturbing way to frame progressive taxation. In the other examples of taxing externalities, we intentionally discourage the behavior by taxing it. Do you intend to discourage people from becoming rich by taxing it? Also, it takes both rich and poor to have inequality. Why not tax poor…
There are some economic/social theories that suggest homelessness is an adequate and necessary deterrent to poverty.
However, I'm not going to address a flaw in your logic, namely that the only role of taxation is deterring undesirable behavior.
Re: The case for an antibiotics tax
#25Too little, too late. There was a CDC report that the 'age of antibiotics' is over and there is little point in limiting their use now. Lets move the conversation on to something productive: what next?
Mass die-offs, plagues, civil unrest ultimately culminating in the end of first-world civilization?
Re: The case for an antibiotics tax
#26> The agency is asking the makers of animal drugs to voluntarily alter their labels so that farmers can no longer buy antibiotics to promote animal growth (a fairly common practice). I was under the impression that growth is secondary to supplementing the animal's immune system, especially since factory farms are terribly unsanitary.
I think that it's everything together. Basically, giving animals antibiotics means that you have more animals (and animal weight) which can be sold at market. If it were more expensive to give antibiotics to the animals, farmers might rethink the equation, deciding to instead raise more, smaller animals in more sanitary environments.
Michael Pollan's excellent book, "The Omnivore's Dilemma," describes at great length the way in which non-factory farms operate, and why he believes they don't need the same sorts of sanitary rules that the government places on factory farms. I have no way of knowing whether he's right, but there's definitely some logic to the claim that antibiotics are addressing the symptom, rather than the root cause.
Re: The case for an antibiotics tax
#27Too little, too late. There was a CDC report that the 'age of antibiotics' is over and there is little point in limiting their use now. Lets move the conversation on to something productive: what next?
Link to report?
Re: The case for an antibiotics tax
#28My fellow libertarians:
Milton Friedman, freedomist gadfly, was in favor of government regulation to protect the population from contagion. The regulation and restriction of antibiotics falls firmly within even a minimalist state's purview.
In other words, the government has a clearer mandate to restrict antibiotic use than it has to restrict heroin use.
Re: The case for an antibiotics tax
#29The basic problem is that one intervention is seeking to fix another. Crop subsidies are the reason why these antibiotics are so widely used. Farmers are encouraged to feed animals food they aren't meant to eat which makes them so sick they need antibiotics to stay alive long enough to be slaughtered. Just end those crop subsidies and let things take care of themselves. A few agribusinesses will be pissed but the res…
Or ban feeding an animal something that is not part of its "natural" diet. Then we have the fun of debating if cows naturally eat corn and soy. Chickens will be particularly fun because they historically ate the scraps from the humans (what we now call "compost" :P), they were the old form of food recycling.
Grain finishing was done before the discovery of antibiotics.
Re: The case for an antibiotics tax
#30My fellow libertarians: Milton Friedman, freedomist gadfly, was in favor of government regulation to protect the population from contagion. The regulation and restriction of antibiotics falls firmly within even a minimalist state's purview. In other words, the government has a clearer mandate to restrict antibiotic use than it has to restrict heroin use.
>Milton Friedman was in favor of government regulation to protect the population from contagion.
I'm gonna call source since none of the literature I've read from Friedman holds such a position. If anything the whole prescription drug system should be abolished and drugs should be marketed directly to consumers.