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Comment by 13of40 | Hacker News Reader

I don't have a subscription so I'm not going to read the article, but maybe someone can tell me how this is different, in a "creating superbugs" sense, from giving antibiotics to livestock when they're not sick.

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Because human infants are not livestock, and this is a huge win for humanity instead of just slightly cheaper beef.

That is true, but has no bearing on the "creating superbugs" sense.

Exactly. The resulting pandemic could cause much more suffering.

The resulting entirely speculative pandemic could have a speculative outcome. Versus actually saving lives now in reality.

You should maybe actually read the article before commenting.

A huge part of it addressed your exact question.

And saying you have no subscription is no excuse - someone posting a link to it at least an hour before you commented.

> You should maybe actually read the article before commenting.

I did not read the article because it's paywalled and I am respecting their business model, as I am not a subscriber.

Then you should not have commented.

The article says that these antibiotics are given as single does months apart for a few years. Any resistance that develops quickly reverts. Livestock on the other hand, get much more regular antibiotics.

If I had to guess, I'd say the mechanism behind that is it's expensive to be antibiotic resistant, and when you revert to normal times the mutation becomes a burden. That's serendipitous, but if it turned out the mutation was OK in either case we would be screwed.

This is not really the best way to cognate about mutation at the bacterial scale. A better way of putting it is that every possible simple mutation is happening right now. If a mutation were truly neutral, it would already be fairly present in the population. It is possible that a complex mutation could emerge with these properties, but the likelihood is much less that the likelihood of many other things that would screw us more.

All that aside, these antibiotic regimes have been carefully designed by people who have already thought very hard about these problems. The single-dose model is designed to produce a significant response with a non-durable mutative result in the population. There's an awful lot of literature about the design process for third-world medication (see e.g. tuberculosis treatment) if you're curious.

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