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The antimicrobial resistance crisis needs action now

journals.plos.org

151–160 of 182 posts

Re: The antimicrobial resistance crisis needs action now

#151
post #147

Last Wednesday night, I drove a torx bit right through the first knuckle on my left index finger. Since I type all day this seemed serious enough to go to the emergency room. When I see the doctor, I am sure I sounded like a fiend looking for a hit but in this case for antibiotics. He tells me that he does not want to give them to me because if I didn't really need them that it could make it so they don't work for me…

Does it work that way? I didn’t think so. Or did he mean in the proverbial, if we overuse them we won’t have them for anyone in 30 years?

I will not say that there is no possibility that I misunderstood him but if I understood him correctly the act of taking the antibiotic will make it less likely to work for me personally in the future.

In hindsight I wish I had ask him to clarify if he was talking about not working for me or in general. If he was talking about in general, I would have pushed harder for my drugs.

Re: The antimicrobial resistance crisis needs action now

#152
post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You drove a bit all the way through the finger? Through the joint/bone? And all you got was a tetanus shot?

Yeah it went through the joint and I got a call the next day telling me it was broken. The PA told me to get splint and to give it a rest for a week.

Jesus. I hope it was significantly less destructive than it sounds.

Re: The antimicrobial resistance crisis needs action now

#153
post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah it went through the joint and I got a call the next day telling me it was broken. The PA told me to get splint and to give it a rest for a week.

Jesus. I hope it was significantly less destructive than it sounds.

I think if it had been any other part of the finger it would have been real bad. I was working and typing with it until getting the call from the PA mid-morning the next day. Really it came at the perfect time with my Christmas break giving me time to heal up.

Re: The antimicrobial resistance crisis needs action now

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nationalization of research laboratories is a very socialist idea. That doesn't make it bad or inefficient, but government takeover of research and education has pretty solid roots in socialism, Marxism, and fascism. The US does spend the most and that leads to output, but that doesn't mean it's the most efficient or does the best job of prioritizing the populations best interests over political or business concerns.…

I agree with you here. A parallel example being the IRS and tax reform that's prevented by private companies in the tax preparation domain.

That's as far from socialism as possible, so I'm really not sure how your example is in agreement.

Re: The antimicrobial resistance crisis needs action now

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A national laboratory is not a socialist idea. If it were then the US would actually be an extremely socialist country given its government spending. Doesn't the US put out the most research in the world, and have the most Nobel prizes? That hardly seems like a country that can't manage this. Nowhere is free of bureaucracy.

Nationalization of research laboratories is a very socialist idea. That doesn't make it bad or inefficient, but government takeover of research and education has pretty solid roots in socialism, Marxism, and fascism. The US does spend the most and that leads to output, but that doesn't mean it's the most efficient or does the best job of prioritizing the populations best interests over political or business concerns.…

A 'national lab' does not have anything to do with 'nationalisation'. Nationalisation means to take over an existing privately run lab, whereas a national lab can be established from scratch without even the hint of a takeover of any private organisation. In the post you replied to there was zero suggestion of nationalisation.

That said, nationalisation is sometimes the correct move as the opposite of privatisation which is also sometimes the correct move, so attaching labels like 'socialist' to it to tar the policy is not productive (just as tarring something as 'capitalist' also does not beget good thinking about policy).

Re: The antimicrobial resistance crisis needs action now

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem is that cost and risk of development and trials is too large for the current rewards, and hence there is very little new antimicrobials being developed If that is so, then that research should be done by the state. The well-being of entire human race cannot be tied to monetary incentives of profiteering.

What are examples of the state actually achieving a research objective better than free enterprise?

Nuclear Energy and space telescopes come to mind.

Re: The antimicrobial resistance crisis needs action now

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought of that too. I don't know enough about it to know if it's a legit counterpoint. My view is that real competition is necessary to efficiently and effectively get to a solution, versus focusing on the bureaucratic mechanics of running the machine that's supposed to be building the solution, which is what happens when government takes things on. But the space program, and maybe the Manhattan project, actually…

> I don't know enough about it to know if it's a legit counterpoint. Its a gigantic counterpoint. A large swath of the technology used today was developed by NASA and then turned over to the private corporations for them to profit. Socializing the costs. Privatizing the profits. The Internet iself an argument. It was developed at DARPA with taxpayer money. Then turned over to the private corporations so that they cou…

I think this is overstatement as to 'turning it over.' DARPA paid for research and operated communications systems in furtherance of a standardized packet network. This was done largely with privately developed tech like commercial telephone wires, commercial modems, commercial minicomputers, commercial solid state RAMs, commercial storage tech. The benefit of DARPA's big funding boost was consolidation, sharing, selection of objectively reasonable choices like tcp/ip, and allowing international collaborators. This sped up the process of having a viable, unified internet wherein other researchers who were not even in the United States contributed tech like the web (on Next computers, with Next software stacks, Motorola chipsets, Sony CRT tech, etc).

Re: The antimicrobial resistance crisis needs action now

#158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't know enough about it to know if it's a legit counterpoint. Its a gigantic counterpoint. A large swath of the technology used today was developed by NASA and then turned over to the private corporations for them to profit. Socializing the costs. Privatizing the profits. The Internet iself an argument. It was developed at DARPA with taxpayer money. Then turned over to the private corporations so that they cou…

I think this is overstatement as to 'turning it over.' DARPA paid for research and operated communications systems in furtherance of a standardized packet network. This was done largely with privately developed tech like commercial telephone wires, commercial modems, commercial minicomputers, commercial solid state RAMs, commercial storage tech. The benefit of DARPA's big funding boost was consolidation, sharing, sel…

> This was done largely with privately developed tech like commercial telephone wires, commercial modems, commercial minicomputers, commercial solid state RAMs, commercial storage tech

Same happened with all of those. The government created the tech, then paid private corporations to implement it, literally funding the everything from scratch while the private corps grabbed the profits.

> This sped up the process of having a viable, unified internet

That's false. Chile's Socialist president was at the point of launching their Internet in mid 70s. Which was ended by the US backed coup.

Re: The antimicrobial resistance crisis needs action now

#159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is this putting less selection pressure on them?

If we start killing everyone by sending them to the vacuum of space, will we evolve to survive those conditions? Some solutions just defy what adaptation is capable of

If all humans had to jump the Golden Gate and swim to shore before procreation, what would we look like in 10000 or 10000000 generations or whatever?

Re: The antimicrobial resistance crisis needs action now

#160
post #15

I am quite sure, that if a sufficient bounty was given out for developing new kinds of antimicrobials, they'd be developed in no time. The problem is that cost and risk of development and trials is too large for the current rewards, and hence there is very little new antimicrobials being developed. There are very many promising leads though, and either making development cheaper (by requiring smaller or fewer clinica…

What if new antimicrobials do get developed? They will once again be used in massive quantities in dirty and otherwise unsanitary livestock operations, resistant bacteria will develop again and we will be where we started again. Actually we will be at a worse place from where we started because all new antimicrobials that do get developed seem ever more dangerous with ever increasing lists of ever more serious side e…

IIRC, antibiotic resistance fades over time, as genes/mutations coding for it tend to be metabolically disadvantageous.

Hypothetically if we had globally enforced cycling of a sufficient amount of antimicrobials, the problem could likely be somewhat minimised.

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