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Comment by pokemongoaway | Hacker News Reader

Not to mention low dose antibiotics are sometimes very therapeutic. When the effective medicines become widespread big pharma has incentive to spend as much money marketing against them as it does to actually develop better stuff. Antibiotics never worked against biofilms anyway - and many of the cases of so-called evil bacteria are actually just full fledged biofilms.

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A number of antibiotics penetrate biofilms just fine: https://academic.oup.com/jac/article/65/9/1955/722668

Ciprofloxacin would be an awesome drug if it didn't promote the development of active C. difficile infection.

"...were grown on black, polycarbonate membranes placed on tryptic soy agar plates..." So ya, definitely not a walk in the park to eliminate the bacteria in the biofilms of grandma's old infection! I never really got the incentive for smart people like you to post sorts of "see, it's solved, we're so advanced" replies online. It makes sense with technology because that is easy to reference and prove one way or another. But implying something is solved in biology is very often problematic, isn't it?

Your objection doesn't really make much sense.

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?

I have noticed that there is absolute zero coverage of biofilm based infections and very little research. A simple dose of doxycycline before the bacteria is able to create a biofilm would prevent years of suffering, doctors flat out refuse to do it until it is to late because of the irrational fear of super bacteria cooked up by the media. This is happening at a huge scale.

This will come as a surprise to the various people I see working on biofilms at conferences.

Also, non-biofilm resistance to Tetracyclines (of which Doxy* is a member) are widespread, and primarily involve the ribosomal subunits.

Oh no, I meant in the context of the news media. I think its great that you see people working on the problem at conferences and I hope they find breakthroughs. My knowledge is very limited and this isn't my area of expertise obviously. I am into small farming. But it interest me and recently I discovered Nitazoxanide and read about how scientist and doctors found out it cures Hep-B and almost cures Hep-C, and the flu -- all viruses, which is pretty amazing to me because it is an antibiotic not a antivirus. It also prevents the creation of biofilm of lyme. Apparently the Hep-B/C discovery lead to a whole new class of treatments that are about to come out or will be.

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.

Here's the problem though - the use of antibiotics in livestock, especially in growth promotion, is part of the problem.

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.

So yes if antibiotics is indeed the problem, and farmers are required, by contract and livestock insurance to use them, for higher profit -- simply make the insurance company liable for the unintended consequence of over use of antibiotics. If a meat wholesaler knew that they could be sued by hospitals for overuse of antibiotics, they would move to protect their profits and forbid it or agree to guidelines. If it is true and factual, scientifically based, this should be no problem proving this in court. Because people don't want unknown unknown counter party risks.

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.

> When the effective medicines become widespread big pharma has incentive to spend as much money marketing against them as it does to actually develop better stuff...

Can you explain why they would do this?

Well they did it with the new generation of painkillers that makes more money and is less efficacious than the old. And they've ruins millions of people's lives with fraudulent research without much recourse - hundreds of books on this topic. First do no harm.

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