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Comment by autokad | Hacker News Reader

“Consider going to back to an era when a minor accident like a scrape could lead to death.”

That a bit of hyperbole, people don't take antibiotics for minor scrapes - soap and water is the prescription. quite often when the minor scrape is life threatening, its something like MRSA. which leads me to think of the stories of people in the past dying of minor scrapes: maybe its been around for longer than we think.

after all of the scare tactics, much of the drug resistance where it matters has been appropriate use. TB, gonorrhea, etc. These diseases didn't become drug resistant because people were taking antibiotics for the flu or use in agriculture.

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It's not, actually. Minor scrapes could lead to death doesn't mean they always did. Same is true today. Most scrapes won't lead you to need antibiotics, but if you start to get very ill after your scrape, you will get treated with antibiotics and live. 100 years ago you might have died - from cutting yourself while gardening, for example.

thats exactly what i said, they could lead to death but they usually dont. Maybe I have to walk you through it:

1) its very rare a cut needs antibiotics 2) if an infection is severe from a 'minor scrape', the prior for it being something like MRSA is much higher 3) minor scrapes in the past also rarely needed antibiotics 4) rare stories of people dying from minor scrapes in the past might have been MRSA

1) is only right because we are vaccinated.

2) in 2017, yea. in the past, the prior for it being MRSA is essentially 0

3) thats because vaccination predates antibiotics

4) nope

your statements amount to "i have no clue how evolution works". bacteria are single cell organisms that dont just suddenly exist into the world being resistant to antiobiotics, which were specifically developed to kill those organisms off.

vaccinations have nothing to do with the conversations about drug resistant bacteria. get that through your head, maybe even write it down and say it out loud.

MRSA existed pre 2017, which it was in fact discovered in the early 1960s.

While I understand that MRSA is probably emerged from antibiotic use, I am open minded enough to consider it could have predated modern use of antibiotics.

bacteria in the world weren't suddenly under threat once antibiotics came along. they have been fighting the fight for 3 billion years. In fact, Penicillin is a natural occurrence used to fight bacteria before humans stumbled upon it.

All of the ways our antibiotics are used to fight bacteria have been something bacteria have been dealing with since they existed.

the only thing people die of today being MRSA is due to vaccination doing a great job at eliminating everything else.

in a pre vaccine pre antibiotics world, every time you get dirt into an open wound, you run the risk of:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetanus

thats not hyperbole. it looks like hyperbole to you because vaccines.

as far as I know, the vaccination for tetanus is not under threat from antibiotic resistance of people taking penicillin from the flu. - or even being under any resistance threat at all.

the hyperbole part is trying to sell a world where a minor scrape leads to death. SURE, its possible (but very unlikely) that could happen, but that could happen under any circumstance anyways.

if you take away tetanus vaccination, a lot of people will die from random scratches. if you dont take it away, then no.

antibiotics resistances dont make bacteria immune to vaccination. entirely different mechanism.

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