101–110 of 414 posts
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…
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I still worry about the profit motive getting in the way. You'll buy antibiotics for days or maybe weeks; you'll buy drugs for high cholesterol the rest of your life.
>you'll buy drugs for high cholesterol the rest of your life Not if you get killed by an infection first.
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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…
As you can imagine, doctors initially got into trouble with this because there is no test that you can use in clinic that says "this patient just has a viral infection". Nevertheless, there are clinical criteria that we can use to come to the same conclusion, and the tide changed years ago with regards to inappropriate antibiotic use for routine viral illnesses. It gets much dicier in-hospital when someone has a SIRS…
The problem is much more with people who only take partial courses or are non-compliant, because if you don't clear the infection then round 2 is full of the slightly more resistant members of the species.
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…
This is the stuff of the Nobel prizes of yore, and it is the mechanistic basis for how antibiotics kill bacteria and not humans. Penicillins destroy the cell wall as it is remodeled (humans don't have a cell wall); lincosamides block protein synthesis at the ribosome (humans have a different ribosomal structure); amphotericin binds ergosterol and forms ion channels in fungal membranes (humans lack ergosterol).
As we continue to explore biochemistry, we will continue to understand (and perhaps even discover) new antimicrobials, though I suspect most of the future advances will come from large-scale screens of discovered or synthesized compounds without taking much biology into account until secondary stages (to increase potency or reduce toxicity).
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It's not an impossible scenario but have the decency not to wrap this 'End of the world fantasy' as a fact or certainty. There have been plenty of those before you and there will be plenty more to come. Y2K, Nuclear War, Swine Flu, Global Warming, Apocalypse, take your pick.
Of those, though, two of the threats were real and mitigated before the impact could be realized (nuclear war and Y2K), and one of them is a fairly recent scientific theory that is still trying to be understood (climate change).
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I still worry about the profit motive getting in the way. You'll buy antibiotics for days or maybe weeks; you'll buy drugs for high cholesterol the rest of your life.
This is touched in the FRONTLINE documentary. See 33:40-40:00 here: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/hunting-the-nightmar... Basically Pfizer, one of the last companies working on antibiotics for gram-negative bacteria, pulled out due to pressure from shareholders, because there's little money to be made here. You spend billions of dollars on creating an antibiotic, and upon its release the recommended instruc…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As you can imagine, doctors initially got into trouble with this because there is no test that you can use in clinic that says "this patient just has a viral infection". Nevertheless, there are clinical criteria that we can use to come to the same conclusion, and the tide changed years ago with regards to inappropriate antibiotic use for routine viral illnesses. It gets much dicier in-hospital when someone has a SIRS…
Resistance is a funny thing: there's nothing specifically wrong with going nuts with the antibiotics provided everything gets dead. The problem is much more with people who only take partial courses or are non-compliant, because if you don't clear the infection then round 2 is full of the slightly more resistant members of the species.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I still worry about the profit motive getting in the way. You'll buy antibiotics for days or maybe weeks; you'll buy drugs for high cholesterol the rest of your life.
This is touched in the FRONTLINE documentary. See 33:40-40:00 here: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/hunting-the-nightmar... Basically Pfizer, one of the last companies working on antibiotics for gram-negative bacteria, pulled out due to pressure from shareholders, because there's little money to be made here. You spend billions of dollars on creating an antibiotic, and upon its release the recommended instruc…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).
People use antibiotics to treat things that are not helped by antibiotics. Antibiotics were routinely used for ear infection even though there's no evidence of benefit. Antibiotics were routinely used for viral illness where there's no possibility of benefit, and possibility of harm. ( http://www.cdc.gov/std/Gonorrhea/STDFact-gonorrhea.htm ) > Untreated gonorrhea can cause serious and permanent health problems in bot…
Are people who have avoided prescribed antibiotics in a better position than those who haven't? Then, what is the effect on such people of the antibiotics taken in by eating meat from animals which have been give antibiotics? Have the people who have been avoiding completely wasted their time?