How Bacteria Eat Penicillin
the-scientist.com
the-scientist.com
IMO we should ban antibiotics use for farmers in the amount they use it today (probably overall, they shouldn't feed antibiotics just to promote growth) and get into research for phage-therapy.
Eventually we will have to face the inevitable superbug that lives in common desinfectant like a warm petridish. Probably already exists even.
Atleast the farmers can make more profit in the meantime.
That is not what a super bug means. It just means that it is resistant to antibiotics. Not that it has a MR of 100. It is possible for people to survive infections without antibiotics. I am surprised that I have to say this aloud. It seems that we are living in a time where people are born convinced that human beings cannot survive without medicines...
"Instead, they focus on farm animals." - While the focus on farm animals occasionally irritates me because it lets doctors off the hook by pretending they're not part of the problem, ESBLs - as an example - are relatively common in livestock.
"...hesitant to prescribe basic antibiotics for conditions that could turn serious, where these people later on could end up in your care because of these mistakes." Of the problems we have, the inappropriate non-use of antibiotics pales in comparison to the inappropriate use of antibiotics, either using an overly broad spectrum agent (like penicillin or ampicillin...), the wrong agent, or treating a viral infection with antibiotics. Antibiotic stewardship, in both the inpatient and outpatient settings, is not pretty much the standard of care, and supported by major medical societies like the Infectious Diseases Society of America and the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America.
"The idea that a super bug could get out of control in the general population is not scientifically sound because it would kill all of its hosts and therefore, kill itself rendering no vector to transfer between hosts. This is why I think ebola outbreaks always die down."
Relying on the concept of susceptible depletion is a really bad idea. It's one of those "just so" stories that seems to make sense, but doesn't work in practice (Ebola doesn't actually die down due to susceptible depletion either...)
The issue is not "OH MY GOD IT WILL KILL EVERYONE" but that there are activities today that are relatively risk free because if you do get an infection it's treatable. Things like surgery and childbirth. Absent effective treatments, the concern is that the mortality rate from infections will rise. Not to 100%, but it also doesn't need to be 100% to be a major public health problem.
Suddenly losing 10, 20, probably up to 60% of certain popluation groups (usually age based, but definitely not race-blind) is to be expected, with some groups more likely than others to be affected. The poor obviously, but beyond that children and elderly, sometimes with a large preference for one sex over another, or one race over another ...
I'm pretty sure that's pretty accurately described as "OH MY GOD EVERYBODY DIES", because ... that's certainly what it'll feel like for at least 6 months.
I think the much more useful examples are to read old historical accounts of every day life. People died of things we now simply assume to be safe - shaving, for example. There are all manner of modern interactions we have with the world and especially the medical system where the expectation is "I won't die during this" - and much of that relies on access to effective antibiotics.
Antibiotic resistance is unlikely to cause an epidemic in the same way as flu. What it's much more likely to do is make people have worse outcomes forever. You won't get gonorrhea any more than you do right now - but if you do it's not a quick course of antibiotics. It's a painful infection followed by the distinct possibility of sterility.
There's no once a generation, massive mortality pandemic of Acinetobacter.
0: https://dailyhistory.org/How_did_the_Bubonic_Plague_make_the...
The problem is that the routine procedures you don't think about as unsafe - like childbirth, patching up cuts, minor surgeries - could suddenly become life-threatening conditions.
Also, non-biofilm resistance to Tetracyclines (of which Doxy* is a member) are widespread, and primarily involve the ribosomal subunits.
My problem is journalist blaming farmers. Two of my products are THC and CBD based. If I made outrageous medical claims or concerns like these journalist, I would lose my livelyhood by regulators. It just grinds my gears that we get the blame for all of this when we want good positive solutions to real problems as well. If the journalist were halfway decent they would figure out that the antibiotics are all about crop/livestock insurance. Farmers are smart people to, just yesterday I got a request to isolate THCV for apparently its neurogensis properties. They wanted a strain that has zero delta-9 THC, the illegal one, for medical purposes. We want good things as well and you can bet your buttons if I login, and see farmers getting blamed for some supposed crisis like creating super bugs that are going to wipe out humanity, I'll look into it-- and call them out on it.
And the part of the problem that is the most optional.
You can make arguments about prophylactic doses - I don't agree with most of those arguments, and think the answer is more humane farming methods are the answer to that, but they exist. But growth promotion (and growth promotion disguised as prophylaxis to get around regulations) is creating a public harm for a private good.
And again, it's not about wiping out humanity. It is things like making that farmer's knee surgery that he needs to keep working way more dangerous.
On another note, my dogs, which are breed for livestock guardian, have a very special trait. If one of my livestock (chickens) show any sign of illness, they immediately kill it. Because the risk of a sick animal that dies and attracts predators, which is unacceptable to them. Also it eliminates a vector for the disease to spread. I don't interfere with it. So even nature has a way of dealing with this problem. What ends up happening is that the rest of the flock goes to pass their better genetics and they don't get sick. Another thing is that a few of my older chickens have caught on to this and appear to hide their sneezes. I might be anthroprojecting.
Can you explain why they would do this?
Ciprofloxacin would be an awesome drug if it didn't promote the development of active C. difficile infection.
The description of how the biofilms were grown is precise because it's a peer-reviewed paper. That it uses big words doesn't mean it's complex. "We grew the biofilms on black plastic with food" is all that sentence says.
That's also growing the biofilm, not penetrating it, which is what you seem to be under the impression it's referring to.
I also didn't claim that "It's solved." Biofilms are a bitch. But claiming that antibiotics don't work against bacteria in biofilms is actively wrong. "Hey, your information is wrong, some broad spectrum antibiotics penetrate biofilms" isn't claiming the problem is solved, just that someone has made a factually incorrect statement.
Which is, you'll note, also why I noted that Cipro has other drawbacks. Do you think I would have done that if I considered the problem "solved"?
To use a programmer example, if someone said "Python's 1-based indexing is a bad idea", would you chew someone out for replying "Python is 0-indexed" and linking to the language description?