Hacker News Reader

Comment by maxerickson | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

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

> 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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com