Antibiotics May Soon Become Useless | The Walrus
Antibiotics May Soon Become Useless | The Walrus
Doctors are looking to an experimental treatment for help
As living organisms, bacteria are encoded by DNA, and DNA occasionally mutates. Sometimes genetic mutations render a bacterium immune to an antibiotic’s chemical tactics. The few cells that might escape antibiotic pressure then have a sudden advantage: with their counterparts wiped out, resources abound, and the remaining antibiotic-resistant bacteria proliferate. It’s a problem not only for the host—you or me when we are treated with an antibiotic and develop a resistant strain—but also for anyone with whom we happen to share our resistant bacteria, say, on a door handle or keyboard. In fact, most resistant bacteria develop not in people but in livestock fed antibiotics to promote growth; these resistant bacteria infect people through contaminated animal products. This is how even antibiotic “naive” people come to be infected with resistant strains of bacteria.
I see this all the time as a family doctor. A woman has a urinary tract infection. I tell her that her bacteria are resistant to this or that antibiotic, and she says, “But I’ve never taken any of those.” Welcome to the global human soup.
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We should have stopped irresponsible use of antibiotics decades ago.
But capitalism decided.
Patients also demand antibiotics even after the health care provider explains that they do no good. PCP’s are left with the choice of prescribing something or risk losing the patient.
So everyone gets a fun little z-pack for their viral infection, and then they get to post how the z-pack cleared things right up.
That use still pales in comparison to use in industrial farming.
Did the USSR not use antibiotics or something?
From the article ...
WHILE PHAGE THERAPY was largely abandoned after the 1940s during the so-called golden age of antibiotics, microbiologists in Eastern Europe and former Soviet republics continued using phages in research and clinical applications.
Sure but they still used antibiotics and had their own production lines.
One of my professors in university was a leading researcher in bacteriophage therapy. They did some amazing things in the 2000s with them, like elimination of only pathogenic strains of E. coli in livestock. I can only imagine what they could do with a budget more inline with pharmaceutical research than that available at a small state school that most students didn't know had a sciences department.
Australia what are you doing? https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/antibiotic-usage-in-livestock
I don't trust these figures at all. The USA's factory farming is gargantuan. Canada is similar to Australia. The only way I could see this chart making sense is if there were diminishing returns in antibiotics at a certain scale or density, which doesn't sound right either, or the winter climate reduced the need for antibiotics.