It is not difficult to make microbes resistant to penicillin in the laboratory by exposing them to concentrations not sufficient to kill them, and the same thing has occasionally happened in the body. - ALEXANDER FLEMING, Nobel Lecture, December 11, 1945
Sounds a lot like live virus vaccines introduced to humans. Weak enough not to kill us and then we develop resistance. Improper dosage of antibiotics is like 'vaccinating' the microbes.
You used the word "evolve" - I don't think this means what you think it means. Evolving means that positive mutations are occurring that assist these organisms; what is really happening is Natural Selection; where already present genetic capabilities are being favored and those populations are thus surviving.
Mutations occur in bacteriophage. Those mutant bacteriophage which can attack previously resistant bacteria are then selected for and become more prevalent.
> is a requirement to not getting sick from eating the products one gives antibiotics to one's thousands of chickens to spur growth (body growth - gaining mass), not to protect the consumer from disease. giving antibiotics to poultry extremely increases mass gains. post-slaughter processes add chemicals that keep meat from rotting, eradicating some of those living harmful bacteria that just so happen to turn flesh in…
I entirely agree on your opinion of the antibiotic situation regarding large scale farming. The problem is that we could not substitute another method to produce enough food to me(e|a)t demand. If we want to keep eating we must have safe food, and to keep food safe in frankly hostile environments we need to treat it. Until we can do without what passes for modern industrialised food growing and processing, we'll need…
There is no need to meet the current demand for meat. If meat was our only food source, then perhaps this syllogism you've drawn would be true.
But in reality, meat is an inefficient form of producing food, with complements humans can easily shift to. So the way you get less antibiotic use in livestock in a capitalist decision market is by reducing the demand for livestock. Taxes do a great job at reducing demand.
Very naive question: won't bacteria lose their resistance after a while? What if we cycle certain antibiotics on an annual basis? When we reintroduce them, they'll be more powerful. Right?
I was chatting to doctor friend recently who has a masters in this area and he said that in theory yes but it would likely require the bacteria to have a reason to loose the mutation that caused the resistance in the first place so there is no guarantee.
Your doctor friend is incorrect. Unused traits will be lost eventually through the accumulation of random mutations. In order for a trait to form and be stable in an organism, selection pressure must not just be applied... it must be maintained.
This backwards process is actually observable. Many fish living in underground caves have lost their eyes through evolution. While eyes don't aid a fish in surviving in the dark, they certainly don't hinder the fish from surviving either... Yet cave fish have lost their eyes despite the lack of negative selection pressure.
easy solution is to just heavily tax dairy, livestock and other industries that produce hundreds of billions of bacteria testing grounds (animals) per year at the same time using last-resport antibiotics to spur growth and reap profits. or give extreme tax benefits to those that don't use antibiotics.
Any research you care to share to support your claims?
> First, a lot of antibiotic resistance appears to be driven by the agricultural use of antibiotics as growth enhancers. Thus, we can be savvy consumers and support and be willing to absorb the costs of the efforts to get antibiotics out of the meat industry.
It's a well known problem, not some esoteric trivia. It is also the biggest cause of selective pressure, not antibacterial soaps or human medicine misuse of antibiotics.
Very naive question: won't bacteria lose their resistance after a while? What if we cycle certain antibiotics on an annual basis? When we reintroduce them, they'll be more powerful. Right?
I'm not sure, but that sounds like it might work. The real problem is: good luck getting all hospitals in the world to agree on a rotated schedule of which antibiotics to use / not use and when.
We are not enforcing a rotating schedule but hospitals are already naturally rotating antibiotics in response to resistance. Once penicillin was lost we switched to another antibiotic. The problem is that we don't have enough classes of antibiotics restart the cycle. It takes way longer for bacteria to lose resistance than for bacteria to gain resistance.
I live in India and despite some improvements, the level of antibiotic abuse here is shocking. They're available over the counter and people self-medicate with antibiotics all the time. The attitude is, "if my sore throat doesn't go away in a couple of days, its time to take antibiotics. No point in going to the doc coz they'll prescribe antibiotics too and this way I save money." People self-medicating on antibiotic…
I live in India and despite some improvements, the level of antibiotic abuse here is shocking. They're available over the counter and people self-medicate with antibiotics all the time. The attitude is, "if my sore throat doesn't go away in a couple of days, its time to take antibiotics. No point in going to the doc coz they'll prescribe antibiotics too and this way I save money." People self-medicating on antibiotic…
This is pretty fucking terrifying. A bacterial 'petri dish' of over a billion humans.
I entirely agree on your opinion of the antibiotic situation regarding large scale farming. The problem is that we could not substitute another method to produce enough food to me(e|a)t demand. If we want to keep eating we must have safe food, and to keep food safe in frankly hostile environments we need to treat it. Until we can do without what passes for modern industrialised food growing and processing, we'll need…
There is no need to meet the current demand for meat. If meat was our only food source, then perhaps this syllogism you've drawn would be true. But in reality, meat is an inefficient form of producing food, with complements humans can easily shift to. So the way you get less antibiotic use in livestock in a capitalist decision market is by reducing the demand for livestock. Taxes do a great job at reducing demand.
Maybe my pun about meet/meat confused you but the problem definitely isn't limited to meat production. You should see the quantites of pesticides/fertilisers/treatment agents used in the extensive culture of plants.
The question holds, if you don't intend to back current production levels that are only possible through over intensive exploitation to the detriment of the product and it's growing medium, what alternatives are there to meet current demand for food in general?
Well the selection environment is a requirement to not getting sick from eating the products. You can't just have a nice chat with the microbe unions and ask them to behave and stay off the meat...
To the presses! I have discovered an alternative method of killing all bacteria on all forms of meat! It involves putting said meat under extreme temperatures thereby killing all microbes! I shall call this brand new method: Cooking!
I spy with my little eye someone who'd die early, in a world without antibiotics.
Some contaminations can't be washed or cooked away (Staphylococcus aureus, some Clostridiums...). And there are a lot of ways to mess up and contaminate an otherwise perfectly fine sample.