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Comment by kryogen1c | Hacker News Reader

Source paper https://science.sciencemag.org/content/365/6459/eaaw1944.ful...

>From 2000 to 2018, the proportion of antimicrobial compounds with resistance higher than 50% (P50) increased from 0.15 to 0.41 in chickens and from 0.13 to 0.34 in pigs and plateaued between 0.12 and 0.23 in cattle.

>Globally, 73% of all antimicrobials sold on Earth are used in animals raised for food.

Jeeeesus. It sure feels like humanity is painting itself into a corner along multiple dimensions. I wonder at how many previous points in history did new technology save us from the brink of annihilation. Im not sure we've ever been powerfull enough to be truly as in danger as we are now.

On the other hand, earth is still slaloming between asteroids we cant predict or stop so we've never been out of danger at all. Oh well, back to work.

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You're being driven into mass hysteria by shitty research and a pop-sci bias which only selects for you the absolute worst possibility under the weakest academic standards.

Take this paper for example. See figure 2? Those numbers come directly from the trend lines on those figures. But look closely at the data. The shading effectively represents how much data they have each year. In the "Chickens" figure there is a box plot in 2000 that is barely discernible, but if you look carefully you see that the distribution matches recent years. How convenient that that data was hidden, since it directly refutes their conclusions.

In fact, the fact that they used bar graphs here is extremely questionable when a scatter plot would far better represent the data. We'd easily be able to glean what the box plots are trying to hide: that the data is extremely noisy, that past data is almost non-existent, and that every year the range of their distribution is nearly 0%-100%.

While there might indeed be an effect in the data over time, the fact is that the effect is far smaller than year-to-year variability.

Professors gotta eat too

> Im not sure we've ever been powerfull enough to be truly as in danger as we are now.

I mean when the Black Death comes along and mops up 30-60% of a continent's entire population in half a decade, you get a little more respect for how terrifying nature has manifested in history...

With that said, we've been two key turns and a button press away from total annihilation since the mid-1950s when the US and Soviets started assembling their nuclear stockpiles.

The fact society still exists past the Cuban Missile Crisis should be considered history's greatest miracle.

It is fascinating to see how comfortable we've all become with living under the threat of near-instant nuclear annihilation.

It's easy to slough off things that are overwhelmingly scary when you have effectively 0 leverage to change them.

One small way consumers can help is to reduce animal consumption. As an industry it releases a decent amount of greenhouse gasses, it creates antibiotic resistance, and it uses a ton of land and water (many of the people burning the Amazon are cattle ranchers). It's also very closely tied to actual consumer demand so consumers can affect it pretty easily.

You say that but we are also creating huge monoculture corps susceptible to a single disease wiping them out long term. Skipping meat is only part of the problem. The real solution is there needs to be long term control of meat and agricultural production to avoid self-inflicted devastation of the food supply.

I never said skipping meat will fix everything, just that it's an easy thing that actual consumers can do to help. The monoculture problem exists but not really relevant at all to the problem I'm talking about seeing how I'm not even saying people should cut out meat completely and there are better ways to diversify the supply of food than to add meat (especially since large amounts of animals are fed off of a monoculture of feed grain).

Interestingly, antibiotics like Rumensin are used to kill off methane-producing gut bacteria and promote other gut flora that are more efficient at digestion.

No, that's the consumers in emergent economies. In the 1st world things are working properly.

That's the all gist about meat consumption: let's look at all the problems meat production has in emergent and 3rd world countries and then tell people in the West they shouldn't eat meat.

Resistance to antibiotics would take us back to 1900, not to the brink of annihilation.

My point isn't to dismiss the problem, just that it would mean things like surgery being much riskier, not massive die offs.

> Resistance to antibiotics would take us back to 1900, not to the brink of annihilation.

You can't assume that the virulence of bacteria with evolved antibiotic resistance will be like that of the strains that existed in 1900.

There's plenty of evidence at this point, it isn't an assumption.

Not so! MRSA has shown increased virulence as it has become more antibiotic resistant.

resistance to atb come and go, if there is no pressure to have defense then its abandoned over not so many generations

Not necessarily. It depends on what's hanging out on the same plasmid as the resistance gene, and if that confers an advantage.

We had massive child mortality rates in 1900.

We would still have access to a lot of modern medicine even if we had no antibiotics. In 1900 we had just started to use sanitation, had no vaccination, and had no clue how _a lot_ if diseases worked.

Population of the UK and Ireland 1900: 40m

Population of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh 1900: 295m

Population of the UK and Ireland 2019: 68m (+70%)

Population of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh 2019: 1,700m (+576%)

That's due to agriculture and lack of synthetic fertilizer, not antibiotics.

https://web.mit.edu/12.000/www/m2016/finalwebsite/solutions/...

"Earth's phosphorus is being depleted at an alarming rate. At current consumption levels, we will run out of known phosphorus reserves in around 80 years, but consumption will not stay at current levels. Nearly 90% of phosphorus is used in the global food supply chain, most of it in crop fertilizers. If no action is taken to quell fertilizer use, demand is likely to increase exponentially."

It's not like it leaves the atmosphere and gets blown into space like Helium. I'm sure it collects in bones, plants, gets washed into the sea and it's generally just spread around.

Average age would be interesting. I imagine a lot lower in 1900

Not to contradict you, but had we the Spanish flu today you'd get 300mm dead within a year, and about 2.5 Billion people hospitalized... that would far exceed any humanitarian crisis we can currently imagine.

The public health response was relatively ineffective in 1918 (influenza was not particularly well understood then), a similar virus would very likely not infect the same proportion of people as were infected then.

The proportion would probably also be reduced in at least 2 ways. The geographic extent would be smaller, and in areas where there were outbreaks, fewer people would be infected.

If there was a good vaccine match for the virus, even more so.

> The geographic extent would be smaller

This is definitely not my area, but as a lay person I've heard that because of the large increase in global travel, a dangerous flu strain could spread basically to basically every continent before we had time to meaningfully respond. Do you have reason to believe that isn't the case?

The 1918 pandemic also arose in a world without air travel. The geographic extent of any similar disease would not be smaller, it would be much larger and spread much quicker.

The Spanish flu came after the Great War, that's what made it so deadly. That and lack of medication, poor sanitation, hunger etc. which made people even more vulnerable. We have similar pathogens today, some if which mutated from the Spanish flu (Influenza type A). Also, flu is caused by a virus and this research is about antibiotic resistant bacteria.

Nothing new here, it started when we realized we're naked.

Before we invented artificial fertilizer, we were legitimately afraid that we're run out of land to grow food.

> It sure feels like humanity is painting itself into a corner along

it's called capitalism, and "increasing shareholder value". This is why large corp lobby in the USA, this is why big pharma bribes anyone with a stethoscope, this is why big oil is trying to stop/slow/control progress of solar/wind.

"We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children" https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/01/22/borrow-earth/

Edit: for many people, today & money is far more important than tomorrow & children. I hope that humanity proves me wrong, but it will get darker before it gets brighter.

Why would the economic system be at fault here? Why is the economic system to "blame"? What alternatives do you have in mind, and how do they compare to capitalism?

It's humanity being painted in a corner, but it's very specific groups of people doing it. Most humanity is also not evolutionary trained in fighting issues, but it's really good at fighting people.

Now, if only scientists could learn how to point fingers...

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