World without antibiotics
publicbooks.org
publicbooks.org
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phage_therapy
It is practiced since the 20ies in Tiblisi Georgia. TED talk about it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjH6m5VuR6I
So it is not all doomsday.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrowsmith_(novel)
I found it to be one more the more inspirational books I had read as a young student.
Probably not a big impact on baseball or cricket (but I don't know much about them), but any contact sport, bicycle races, motor sport, climbing, etc has a good chance of generating large scratches and injuries (broken bones, torn tendons, etc) that result in surgical treatment. How many football players (both the American and the rest of the world varieties) would survive a full career, from childhood to mid 30s? And there is some crash at almost every single pro bicycle race, with broken collarbones and/or patches of skin peeled off by sliding on the tarmac. Again, how may of them would make it into the 40s without antibiotics? Amateurs go cycling for fun on Sunday morning. They also crash. A broken collarbone is bad, but risking the life for a scratch is much worse.
Nope. Penicillin was first produced in quantity in 1942. The first Tour de France was held in 1903. Six-day track racing dates back to 1878. The Bordeaux-Paris race started in 1891 and was motor-paced for most of its history - the riders would slipstream behind cars or motorcycles, achieving tremendous speeds. The inadequate brakes and tires and the poor road surfaces of that era made road racing far more hazardous than it is today.
Pre-war riders sometimes died from racing-related trauma and exhaustion, but most of them lived to a ripe old age. Antibiotic resistance is clearly a bad thing, but it has been hyped to the point of hysteria by people who don't take the long view. People didn't swaddle themselves in cotton wool before 1942, they just got on with life. Some of them died of sepsis, but poor hygiene was a far more significant cause than the lack of antibiotics.
Anecdote aside, I have the feeling that you'd find more people succumbing to lifestyle ailments than not if you were to (hypothetically) ban all kinds of physical activity.
The usual model of drug development is
Spot opportunity > spend lots on R&D > Go into production > maximise sales > recoup money as soon as possible > Profit!
However, with new antibiotics we, as society absolutely do not want them to maximise sales. Ideally we don't want any production at all. At worst, we'd like it to be used in a handful of cases for 5, 10 or 20 years, keeping it as a treatment of last resource.
In such circumstances you can see the problem for the pharmaceuticals. Personally, I think there needs to be some kind of prize fund that can let the companies recoup (and make a decent profit) from antibiotic discoveries. Either that or public-sector research.
"expensive" antibiotics are $10-$1000 per course.
All antibiotic users benefit from new antibiotics, it would discourage overuse of existing antibiotics and provide significant funding for development.
A few large western countries working together and such a fund would quickly reach hundreds of millions of dollars.
ADDED
Since people seem to have trouble with the antibacterial claim, here is an article: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/23009190/
Just google “pubmed blue light antimicrobial”.
Even supposing that the light really kills germs, the light won't reach all spots in the wound and it wouldn't reach the bacteria that already entered the bloodstream.
You are right that light might only kill bacteria on tissue surface. But this is exactly where surgeons need it! My grandfather died of complications caused by a resistant strain infection after hip surgery. What happened is that bacteria from the environment entered the wound before it was sealed. Sure, you won't remotely kill all germs, but you might make an otherwise deadly infection manageable.
Just because it's not yet done, does not mean it's BS.
Cleaning things _before_ you operate is relativly easy. Iodine/bleach/listerene/arsenic/ozone will all kill bacteria on surfaces.
Why antibiotics are great is that they can be taken orally and they kill bacteria _inside_, but not your body.
UV/blue light is indescriminate, you can swallow a blue light pill and expect it to descriminate between your body and non-local bacteria
FCVO "your body". Antibiotics definitely do kill gut bacteria, which many consider to be part of our bodies.
For example Arsenic is a brilliant antibiotic, its just it kills you _and_ the infection. what we call antibiotics are far more diserning.
"In a proof-of-concept study, led by Dr. Michael R. Hamblin of Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, an array of blue LEDs was used to treat infected burns on lab mice. More specifically, the blue light was used to selectively eradicate potentially-lethal Pseudomonas aeruginosa bacteria in the animals’ skin and soft tissues.
The results of the study were promising. All of the light-treated mice survived, while 82 percent of the untreated control group died. Additionally, unlike bacteria-killing ultraviolet light, the blue light wasn’t harmful to the animals’ own cells."
Because surgeons are still going to use sterile technique, chlorhexdine, and Ancef prophylaxis. If blue light helps in a couple trials, they'll add the blue light. Maybe it'll kill those few extra aerosolized bacteria or something
Yes it is promising, but its not a golden bullet and will not replace antibiotics.
> not only some - don't know where you get that info? I got it from the paper you linked: Leuconostoc mesenteroides (LM), Bacillus atrophaeus (BA) or Pseudomonas aeruginosa (PA)
Credits to the EU for regulation this aggressively.. I even think the US is doing something: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antibiotic_use_in_livestock
As with climate change, this is probably going to hit emerging economies the hardest.. due to lack of regulation and less ability to deal with cost of workarounds.
Literally everyone is doing something about it in animal care (in the EU we lost availability of many specialties, or some are now usable only after antibiograms), yet it doesn't get better because MDs don't do shit. And what can they do after all, people can just go and find another practitioner. I just hope that with such reasoning you're ready to have your animal protein have its price tripled then or see your dog die of pneumonia, because that's what we're coming to.
Or maybe everyone needs to brace themselves and endure having a cold for 2 more days and not resort to antibiotics for every little thing, or we will soon leave our YOPI (young, old, pregnant, immunosuppressed) to dying with no available care. By our current state of overpopulation, it's not a big deal after all.
> Or maybe everyone needs to brace themselves and endure having a cold for 2 more days and not resort to antibiotics for every little thing
The reduction in antibiotic use here by doctors is also pretty noticable. I certainly don't get antibiotics prescribed for every little thing. Also, it's important to remember that while doctors might seem like they throw antibiotics at every patient, they typically prescribe the same very narrow antibiotics for everyone and use broad spectrum ones more restrictively (which is a good thing). It would be terrible if people could buy broad spectrum antibiotics over the counter.
>our ban on antibiotics for growth
Which were the only approved use of antibiotics in animals in your country without a doubt.
>I certainly don't get antibiotics prescribed for every little thing
Yeah me neither yet the spectacular decrease we should see is not there yet. Maybe there are other, more exigent patients then ?!
>they typically prescribe the same very narrow antibiotics for everyone and use broad spectrum ones more restrictively (which is a good thing). It would be terrible if people could buy broad spectrum antibiotics over the counter.
Well luckily some are only available in hospitals or such. But when I hear war stories from a veterinarian friend who switched to human medicine and sees lastest quinolones used systematically no matter the health status of the person for benign procedures, we just facepalm. They don't want to take the 5% risk that someone will need aftercare I guess. But MRSA and nosocomial infections are the real, growing threat...
You mean countries had (or has) laws that prohibited antibiotics for its proper use (to treat infection) but allowed antibiotics in livestock for growth stimulation? Which countries were that? And what would be the reasoning behind that?
As I understood it, the "bad" countries allow antibiotics for both purposes, whereas the "good" countries started restricting antibiotics for growth, and eventually banned it completely. Have I completely misunderstood you mean?
(Growth is still systematically stimulated through hormones injections in cattle at least in the Canada/US, and this is completely banned in the EU, maybe there's some mix up there ?)
> eventually banned it completely
No, luckily it's not completely banned anywhere I know of, and I hardly see this happening tbh. Even in organic productions and such its a number of treatments (or quantity per animal) limit per year. It is not banned and breeding animals would be hardly sustainable if it were.
Of course, the elephant in the room is the use in China/India/Brazil. I wonder how close we are to those countries adopting EU/US style regulation. Basically, how do we tell China/India/Brazil that they will simply have to accept protein prices that are much higher?
80% of the antibiotics used in the US are given to animals, not people:
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/09/are-antibiotics-turni...
Yes, absolutely. In fact higher meat prices probably wouldn't be a bad thing :)
On topic: maybe I was a bit extreme, what I meant was that if we limit agriculture usage of antibiotics, then we can hopefully avoid the kind of dystopian rationing for humans that the article talks about.
I'm certainly willing to see higher meat prices before we ration antibiotics away from humans who critically need it. (not talking about a cold that would go away on it's own)
So, yes, things were hardned few years ago.
When I was in middle school I had fallen very ill. I was sick for over 30 days. I was also low income and the process of going to the doctor made things worse. I could hardly move or swallow. I was not eating and loads of green stuff. Chills and fever over and over. I had taken everything the local doctors had prescribed. Nothing was working. I was not getting better.
My band teacher at the time was very concerned. I had missed over a month of school. So he made trip to visit family in Mexico. He smuggled back a big bottle of amoxicillin. Mother crushed them into honey and after only two doses and one night I was already improving. I was able sit up and eat and things progressed on until I was healthy again. If it were not for my band teacher I am sure I would have died.
Thank you Mr. Garcia.
It is a real shame that people abuse these powerful tools. That we allow cooperate interest trump that of humanity's.
First of all, that's not true; there's substantial overlap between agricultural and human use, for example the Bacitracin we use in the U.S. to promote growth in livestock, and the colistin now flooding Chinese agriculture.
Second, it wouldn't matter even if you were right; bacteria acquire resistance to classes of related antibiotics. So, for example, when bacteria become resistant to the fluoroquinolones that we regularly put in poultry feed in the U.S., those bacteria will likely be immune to Cipro when they infect you.
A sustained low-level dose of antibiotic is proven to foster antibiotic resistance.
Sorry, but your comment is completely wrong.