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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”

#171

Post by dylandrop »

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.

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?

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

#172

Post by Timothee »

hodder wrote: post #86

The anthropomorphism of bacterial evolution makes the article hard to follow for the layman (me). Can someone familiar with bacterial evolution please explain to me how the use of antibiotics leads to superbugs? I am clearly misunderstanding something. I was under the impression that in a population of bacteria, genes express themselves in any number of random ways. If we expose the bacterial culture to antibiotics,…

That's a good question.

I have no credentials or background to know the answer, but I wonder if this is something where the use of antibiotics decimates most the bacteria population so that it's easier for the resistant ones to thrive, as opposed to cohabitate and possibly be overtaken by the non-resistant ones. I'm thinking of it like Conway's Game of Life where a cell dies if surrounded by more than 3 cells. With antibiotics, you limit the number of living cells around and are more likely to keep others living.

Or maybe the non-resistant ones would have another trait that make them thrive more than the resistant ones if both are mixed?

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

#173

Post by thomasz »

baddox wrote: post #100
jasonshen wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

Yes, the talk of desire is clearly personification that's not meant to be taken literally.

He's dumbing it down a little bit for the audience, what a crime!

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

#174

Post by JumpCrisscross »

mistercow wrote: post #138
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…

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…

"If the problem space doesn't contain a solution that can be climbed toward without sacrificing fitness in the short term, it is unlikely that it will ever be found by evolution."

This is a stunning visual - thank you. I see a multi-dimensional space of possible organism "configurations". Each dimension is a set of related alleles, spaced by the amount of energy it would take to shift from one to the other, i.e. the likelihood of switching that allele independently. Angles between dimensions indicate correlation, or more fundamentally the cost of holding similarly positioned alleles simultaneously. Each organism is a point in that space with a species being a cloud.

When one shines a "light", i.e. an antibiotic, on the space it lights up with warmer colours signifying configurations which take less energy for the organism to survive as (are more favourable) and cooler colours denoting deadlier configurations.

Thus, antibiotics become a game of chess. Humans try to box the organism into coolly coloured regions. That way, the amount of energy it would take to "tunnel" through the wall would be high. The organism, on the other hand, is trying to find warm "tunnels" by which to escape regions which are being boxed in. Advantage to the organism is it can build new dimensions.

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

#175

Post by dsizzle »

vidarh wrote: post #152
tedunangst wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clearly, everyone needs to stop washing their hands, or bacteria will develop soap immunity. And then what will we do?

Killing bacteria is easy. The trick is killing bacteria without harming ourselves. Soaps can be massively more "brutal" in terms of the mechanisms that destroy bacteria than what antibiotics can, and so the evolutionary steps that would have to occur for resistance are vastly larger, and would mean changing them in many different directions. E.g. it does not help if a bacteria can survive a soap if it is still physic…

You don't directly address the resistance question, but I think that issue comes down to the "escalation ladder", which you do bring up. You can increase the effective of handwashing (or ultraviolet or whatever) in a way that just isn't possible with antibiotics.

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

#176

Post by narrator »

baddox wrote: post #100
jasonshen wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

Yes, the talk of desire is clearly personification that's not meant to be taken literally.

"Desire" implies that the bacteria is acting purposefully and planning ahead. This isn't what's happening unless you attribute the bacteria's activity to some sort of intelligence.

On the contrary, we eliminated smallpox which was one of the most devastating diseases in history so this fatalism is basically disproved. More depressingly, we've also made extinct thousands of species who have not evolved to resist us.

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

#177

Post by ChuckMcM »

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…

Interesting, was going to say basically the same thing. At what point do we start designing RNA with a delivery mechanism that attaches itself to a specific bacterial type and eliminates it?

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

#178

Post by freehunter »

philwelch wrote: post #167
jacobquick wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the 80s we acted faster on freon/CFCs than we have on climate change in the ensuing 30 years, with less danger to human life and less evidence. The only thing that's new about climate change as a scientific theory is the annual increase in the pile of evidence that it's happening and we're the cause of it.

Freon and CFC's were easier to replace.

Exactly. Those are two specific things that needed to be eliminated. Climate change deals with a lot of bad actors, and a very broad category of changes.

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

#179

Post by ssmoot »

TsiCClawOfLight wrote: post #145
ssmoot wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think as a rule people aren't as stupid as "common knowledge" would like to pretend. My 18mo daughter has had a half dozen ear infections and two staph infections. Antibiotics each time. Would it be better to leave a staph infection untreated with antibiotics? How? Lance and clean the infection site... and then what? Or ear infections? I had frequent undiagnosed ear infections as a small child and now have reduced…

I'm not talking about infants, I'm talking about the majority of the adult population which can take good care of it's own.

Yeah, it's still a superiority insult.

I think I've been prescribed antibiotics for an obviously viral infection one time in my adult life. I can count the number of times (in my late 30s) that I've been prescribed antibiotics as an adult on one hand.

When you factor in that people just don't go to Dr's all that often in the US, especially the poor, I'd need to see some actual data before I believe this is a grossly American problem. Because given other factors, you'd be forgiven for thinking something doesn't add up with that characterization.

I would for example, imagine it's much more of an issue in the UK with people having cheap convenient access to the NHS.

In the US I'd have to find a Dr, and if I'm uninsured that means spending a half-day at the ER, and then I'd have to take that Rx to a Pharmacy, who's going to offer me a generic at an uninsured price that's probably somewhere around my grocery budget.

If it's an issue at all (comparable to countries with socialized medicine) in the US it would almost have to be an exclusively middle to upper class behavior.

That's a good deal of the population that just doesn't play the game.

Honestly, framing this as a Stupid Fat American problem reads like "Are Antibiotics Going to Kill Your Children?!? Find out tonight on XYZ News at 6PM!!!". Those stories are definitely out there and pretty pervasive. It would be pretty ironic if Geeks with Superiority Complexes were being feed their dogma by "common knowledge" based on soundbites from the nightly news...

Not to dismiss this as a problem. But insulting people (even comparably low quality-of-life Americans) doesn't get us any closer to a solution. And blaming those people, already stretched thin by work hours, insurance costs (if they even have it), day care, trying to ensure they get to sit down for a family dinner, go to work sick so they can afford the time off for a family vacation that they're the problem because they're just dumb Americans is... It's to express in words how petty and mean spirited that comes off as.

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

#180

Post by Bjoern »

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…

> Bacteria don't desire anything, and they don't seek out anything or plan anything.

Bacteria are not fully understood and there are things such as Quorum Sensing which implies some method to the chaos.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quorum_sensing

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