I wish he mentioned the massive dumping of antibiotics into our food supply via feedlots, et cetera. You think the fact that all the meat we eat is swimming in antibiotics for its entire life has something to do with this antibiotic resistant bacteria in our stomachs? It'd be a damn shame to undo one of the miracles of the twentieth century so your chicken sandwich is fifty cents cheaper.
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”
#22I know the article tries to explain things in a way a layman can understand, but the wording when it comes to evolution is quite poorly chosen IMO. Saying thinks like 'Bacteria, like any living organism, want to survive' and 'bacteria will always change in order to survive', are just incorrect and will result in big misconceptions.
To my knowledge, bacteria don't have an agenda, they don't want to survive and they certainly don't change in order to survive. Instead, they change at random, which sometimes helps an individual to survive and sometimes not.
Re: Dr. Arjun Srinivasan: We’ve Reached “The End of Antibiotics, Period”
#23Really don't like the anthropomorphism.
The bacteria hate it too.
Re: Dr. Arjun Srinivasan: We’ve Reached “The End of Antibiotics, Period”
#24> Eventually bacteria will evolve, and they’ll adapt ways around that to overcome that obstacle. I am more optimistic than that. Sure: as long as antibiotic resistance is crucial for bacterial survival, bacteria have a natural need to evolve it. And, they will. But, this will come with a genetic cost to the bacteria. The reason that antibiotics work is because they are attacking some function that has deliberately ev…
>The reason that antibiotics work is because they are attacking some function that has deliberately evolved, through natural selection, to be like that. Antibiotic resistance must literally cost bacteria some efficiency in some of their other functions.
I'm not convinced that there must be a cost; furthermore, I think it's unlikely that if there is a cost, it is high enough to be significant. Bugs evolve, but they do not necessarily evolve optimally all of the time. It is possible that an evolutionary step towards resistance might also improve the fitness of the germ overall (for example, by further optimizing the efficiency of a metabolic pathway). That evolutionary step might have been inevitable, but required additional selective pressure or the presence of a more active mutagen to actually occur.
Your claim is sort of assuming that each bug is already optimal for its environment, and any change must therefore be deleterious in some regard, but I hold that neither fact is necessarily true.
Re: Dr. Arjun Srinivasan: We’ve Reached “The End of Antibiotics, Period”
#25> Eventually bacteria will evolve, and they’ll adapt ways around that to overcome that obstacle. I am more optimistic than that. Sure: as long as antibiotic resistance is crucial for bacterial survival, bacteria have a natural need to evolve it. And, they will. But, this will come with a genetic cost to the bacteria. The reason that antibiotics work is because they are attacking some function that has deliberately ev…
This makes the assumption that evolution results in a perfect organism, which it does not. Instead, it results in a "good enough" organism.
The definition of "good enough" for bacteria has changed over the last 50 years, so these changes are occurring now. It doesn't necessarily require a cost, or at least not a cost that matters to humans.
Re: Dr. Arjun Srinivasan: We’ve Reached “The End of Antibiotics, Period”
#26I wish he mentioned the massive dumping of antibiotics into our food supply via feedlots, et cetera. You think the fact that all the meat we eat is swimming in antibiotics for its entire life has something to do with this antibiotic resistant bacteria in our stomachs? It'd be a damn shame to undo one of the miracles of the twentieth century so your chicken sandwich is fifty cents cheaper.
There's an entire section on the use of antibiotics in agriculture.
Re: Dr. Arjun Srinivasan: We’ve Reached “The End of Antibiotics, Period”
#27It wasn't long ago that thread appeared about silver making antibiotics thousands of times more effective.
Not sure where the thread is but the story here: http://www.nature.com/news/silver-makes-antibiotics-thousand...
Re: Dr. Arjun Srinivasan: We’ve Reached “The End of Antibiotics, Period”
#28For the past half century, we should have been treating our antibiotics like weapons of mass destruction - tools of last resort only to be used in emergencies, with great hesitation, and only when absolutely necessary. The industry and the doctors responded: antibiotics were too profitable and the risk seemed too distant. Now we have no weapons; we're helpless and the world is again going to be a scary place where a…
> Now we have no weapons; we're helpless and the world is again going to be a scary place where a cut or a scrape can land you in a hospital or in a mortuary. Perhaps most terrifying is that the mere act of hospitalization will likely be the highest vector of transmission of nearly untreatable infections. Go in for a routine procedure and end up in the isolation ward due to some highly infectious, deadly disease.
> Perhaps most terrifying is that the mere act of hospitalization will likely be the highest vector of transmission of nearly untreatable infections. Go in for a routine procedure and end up in the isolation ward due to some highly infectious, deadly disease.
This is one reason to avoid hospitals at all cost. It's also why hospitals are terrible as a first treatment option for the poor. I can't recall a family hospital trip where someone didn't catch something new at the hospital.
Re: Dr. Arjun Srinivasan: We’ve Reached “The End of Antibiotics, Period”
#29Okay, I'm sold, as a citizen, that this is an issue I and my child's generation will have to face. How can I help?
Re: Dr. Arjun Srinivasan: We’ve Reached “The End of Antibiotics, Period”
#30What about Linezolid? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linezolid
The Wiki article you linked specifically mentions Linezolid isn't necessarily effective against many Gram-negatives (the resistant bacteria): Linezolid has no clinically significant effect on most Gram-negative bacteria. Pseudomonas and the Enterobacteriaceae, for instance, are not susceptible.[90] In vitro, it is active against Pasteurella multocida,[2][91] Fusobacterium, Moraxella catarrhalis, Legionella, Bordetell…
Oh, thanks, missed that.