Imagining the Post-Antibiotics Future

[Javaman]

https://medium.com/p/892b57499e77

snip

Fleming’s prediction was correct. Penicillin-resistant staph emerged in 1940, while the drug was still being given to only a few patients. Tetracycline was introduced in 1950, and tetracycline-resistant Shigella emerged in 1959; erythromycin came on the market in 1953, and erythromycin-resistant strep appeared in 1968. As antibiotics became more affordable and their use increased, bacteria developed defenses more quickly. Methicillin arrived in 1960 and methicillin resistance in 1962; levofloxacin in 1996 and the first resistant cases the same year; linezolid in 2000 and resistance to it in 2001; daptomycin in 2003 and the first signs of resistance in 2004.

snip

Bell’s prediction is a hypothesis for now—but infections that resist even powerful antibiotics have already entered everyday life. Dozens of college and pro athletes, most recently Lawrence Tynes of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, have lost playing time or entire seasons to infections with drug-resistant staph, MRSA. Girls who sought permanent-makeup tattoos have lost their eyebrows after getting infections. Last year, three members of a Maryland family — an elderly woman and two adult children — died of resistant pneumonia that took hold after simple cases of flu.

snip

Dukes believes, though he has no evidence, that the bacteria in his gut became drug-resistant because he ate meat from animals raised with routine antibiotic use. That would not be difficult: most meat in the United States is grown that way. To varying degrees depending on their size and age, cattle, pigs, and chickens — and, in other countries, fish and shrimp — receive regular doses to speed their growth, increase their weight, and protect them from disease. Out of all the antibiotics sold in the United States each year, 80 percent by weight are used in agriculture, primarily to fatten animals and protect them from the conditions in which they are raised.

snip

Researchers and activists have tried for decades to get the FDA to rein in farm overuse of antibiotics, mostly without success. The agency attempted in the 1970s to control agricultural use by revoking authorization for penicillin and tetracycline to be used as “growth promoters,” but that effort never moved forward. Agriculture and the veterinary pharmaceutical industry pushed back, alleging that agricultural antibiotics have no demonstrable effect on human health.


(much much more at link)

[polichick]

1. According to a recent NPR show, 60+% of antibiotics in the U.S...

is found in our food supply, and about 40% is used to treat human illness.

Also, neither the gov't nor big pharma is developing new antibiotics - no money for that in the gov't and no profit for big pharma (they like meds you have to stay on for a lifetime).

[Kurovski]

2. K&R. (nt)

[KT2000]

3. even if they developed

more antibiotics, the practices will not have changed and resistance would develop for those too.
It is just pathetic that judicious use of antibiotics could have prevented this scenario but it is still full steam ahead to misuse them for profits. Our post-antibiotics future will look much like the pre-antibiotics past.

The best we can do is read up on the plants that will fight infections. Where antibiotics are singular weapons, plants have so many compounds, bacteria cannot respond with a single mutation. That may be the best we could hope for.

[polichick]

5. Excellent Book - HERBAL ANTIBIOTICS: Natural Alernatives for...

Treating Drug-Resistant Bacteria by Stephen Harrod Buhner

[KT2000]

8. You bet!

I wrote a book review on that book - fascinating information, well presented and SCARY!!

Actually, I even took that book with me when my brother was having major surgery - just in case.

[CrispyQ]

4. A very sobering read.

~kick.

[KamaAina]

6. The money quote, literally:

With antibiotics losing usefulness so quickly — and thus not making back the estimated $1 billion per drug it costs to create them — the pharmaceutical industry lost enthusiasm for making more. In 2004, there were only five new antibiotics in development, compared to more than 500 chronic-disease drugs for which resistance is not an issue — and which, unlike antibiotics, are taken for years, not days.

So it's OK if we go back to the Dark Ages as long as Big Pharma maintains its fat profit margin.

[JCMach1]

7. This article imagines a world that doesn't move forward... researchers are already hitting the

problem...

Like werewolves and vampires, bacteria have a weakness: silver. The precious metal has been used to fight infection for thousands of years — Hippocrates first described its antimicrobial properties in 400 bc — but how it works has been a mystery. Now, a team led by James Collins, a biomedical engineer at Boston University in Massachusetts, has described how silver can disrupt bacteria, and shown that the ancient treatment could help to deal with the thoroughly modern scourge of antibiotic resistance. The work is published today in Science Translational Medicine1.

“Resistance is growing, while the number of new antibiotics in development is dropping,” says Collins. “We wanted to find a way to make what we have work better.”

Collins and his team found that silver — in the form of dissolved ions — attacks bacterial cells in two main ways: it makes the cell membrane more permeable, and it interferes with the cell’s metabolism, leading to the overproduction of reactive, and often toxic, oxygen compounds. Both mechanisms could potentially be harnessed to make today’s antibiotics more effective against resistant bacteria, Collins says...

http://www.nature.com/news/silver-makes-antibiotics-thousands-of-times-more-effective-1.13232