The looming antibiotic crisis can't be solved by the free market
Most of us alive today do not remember life before antibiotics. I would have had one more uncle had penicillin been available a year earlier; up through the first half of the twentieth century, many now-minor diseases were fatal. Antibiotics were the original miracle drugs, curing a range of bacterial diseases.
But the antibiotic era may be ending. Antibiotics contain the seeds of their own destruction: A few bacteria occasionally have mutations that lead to resistance, and those quickly multiply. Thus an antibiotic's useful life span is limited. In the 1960s, I used to take Penicillin G for various things. It has been out of general use for decades. A range of other members of that beta-lactam antibiotic family have been developed since then, each one chasing after the newly-resistant strains of bacteria that kept emerging. And other antibiotic families chased after other types of bacteria, or served those with a common allergy to penicillin and its relatives. For a few decades, the pharmaceutical industry kept up with the threat.
But now the bacteria are winning. And we're not doing anything about it. This is the microbiological cousin of global warming, a public health crisis that capitalism can't solve.
The problem is not just that we can't keep creating new antibiotics. It's more systemic than that. We no longer even try. The medical and pharmaceutical industry structure has no room for antibiotic research and development.
More at: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/03/12/1193669/-The-looming-antibiotic-crisis-can-t-be-solved-by-the-free-market
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