161–170 of 182 posts
I think the pandemic gave us a good reality check about how much is going to actually get done about an urgent crisis: not much.
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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
eg space suits and whatever else needed to survive :p
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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.
The hand is a complicated appendage. There’s a ton that can go wrong treating it or things that can be missed. Early intervention from a hand surgeon could potentially make a significant difference in long-term outcomes.
Honestly, you might take your X-rays & get a second opinion. Don’t mess around with injuries to your hands, especially if you use them to make your living.
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> Evolving resistance comes at a cost for bacteria and over time they might loose resistance against previous antibiotics. This is known as the "ecological fallacy". > reversion to sensitivity is neither an immediate nor necessary outcome of selection simply because a resistant pathogen is no longer in an antibiotic-laden environment [1] [1] "Why Do Antibiotics Exist" - https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/mBio.01966…
...that is not how I've ever heard "the ecological fallacy" used, and this is what I do for a living.
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You need to kill bacteria, not kill humans and print money. The optimal strategy is to wait as long as possible as the value of a novel drug goes up as resistance goes up.
Hot take, but I actually think this is good since it means we postpone usage of, and thereby resistance to, any new antibiotics. The second there’s a new antibiotic, poor countries are going to over-use generics of it and create resistance.
Humans inability to effectively organize doesn’t matter to the bacteria. As a species, we have the ability to understand that what happens in impoverished areas impacts us all. The smart move would be to rethink healthcare, globally.
Otherwise, those bacteria, who can’t argue, will just relentlessly keep evolving.
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This was a light bulb comment for me, thank you. The challenge is: 1) finding something that kills mostly/only cells we don't want in or around our cells 2) kill them in such a ruthlessly efficient way that there are no survivors As a sibling points out, the vacuum of space does #2 quite well. Actually we have a lot of stuff that handles #2 quite well. But #1, differentiating between "good" and "bad" with our murder…
We need to create nanides: nano-scale machines that can differentiate between microbes and destroy the bad ones. Just don't piss them off with a phaser blast when they get into the ship's computer core.
...In the sense we're here because an implementation evolved, however, the physics and minutiae of the problem domain are so numerous that even nature with billions of years of time, and the happy accident of intelligent tool using life haven't been able to make significant inroads on nailing down the problems space in an "ahead of the machine" sense yet.
Just like global warming, ridiculous wealth inequality and housing crises, outdated primary education systems, air and water pollution, diabetes and obesity crises, increasing prevalence of autism, and still ongoing COVID need action. I think the pandemic gave us a good reality check about how much is going to actually get done about an urgent crisis: not much.
There may be better language to attract people to get involved in your projects.
I bet all those antibiotics prescribed for covid didn't help as well. That was happening on a massive scale in my country
The biggest risk factor when it comes to infection in general is agriculture: - We encroach ever closer and closer to reservoirs of animal illnesses, which is how we got OG SARS, MERS and Covid. - We give farm animals prophylactic antibiotics to promote growth or, worse, keep them alive in completely unsanitary conditions, and the conditions in slaughterhouses are often horrible as well. That is not just plain horrib…
You do not want to stop this. Topsoil is a damn complicated thing, and bacteria and other decomposers are critical to freeing up and breaking down organic material to keep the nutrient cycle going. Try growing a plant in a sterile soil, and you end up having to maintain it on artificial fertilizers instead of being able to let microbiota do their thing.
I've got a hunch part of our degradation in crop nutrition and loss of topsoil quality is probably stemming from overuse of chemical fertilizer, as well as fundamental microbiome depletion from overuse of antibiotics in industrial farming processes. The unfortunate part being there may not be much to be done about it if there is a desire to maintain our current population carry capacity, because replenishing of it would require reversion to less short-term efficient agriculture, but more long term sustainable methods.
BTW for anyone who wants to help but thinks this is mostly wetlab/drug development work. There's quite a bit of room in the space for the computer-vision side of things to improve decision-making and time to treat. I think it's mostly based on phenotyping by imaging and identifying low-specimen cultures but I might be totally wrong. Some competitions: - https://longitudeprize.org/ - https://dpcpsi.nih.gov/AMRChalleng…
I mean, yes, there is a crisis. We need action now. Many people are offering solutions and new research directions. But money are simply not there.
Its a topic that comes up again and again. We are getting resistance against modern antibiotics. There are a ton of old antibiotics that have been out of use for decades that should be retested as possible weapons. Evolving resistance comes at a cost for bacteria and over time they might loose resistance against previous antibiotics. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmicb.2014.0055... The problem is no ph…
> Evolving resistance comes at a cost for bacteria and over time they might loose resistance against previous antibiotics. This is known as the "ecological fallacy". > reversion to sensitivity is neither an immediate nor necessary outcome of selection simply because a resistant pathogen is no longer in an antibiotic-laden environment [1] [1] "Why Do Antibiotics Exist" - https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/mBio.01966…