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Comment by hospitalJail | Hacker News Reader

>I truly wonder sometimes whether antibiotics are actually underused in medicine (while simultaneously being overused in the food supply chain).

In the US, this is basically a given. You don't have to look past the lobbying numbers to understand why.

I'm curious outside the US, how often antibiotics are given out. From my buddies telling me stories about Mexico + the fear mongering with US Physicians, you'd expect a superbug to have broken out by now.

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Multiple superbugs have broken out and are killing thousands every year. The irresponsible overuse of antibiotics in places like Mexico is certainly part of the problem.

https://www.cdc.gov/drugresistance/about.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clostridioides_difficile_infec...

There is no mention on your page, or the wiki, that antibiotics are the cause the resistant bacteria.

I can logically see why we would believe this, but you'd expect given the use of antibiotics on the farm and in non US pharmacies; we'd have such a superbug scientifically proven by now.

Scientifically it's nearly impossible to prove things. However, scientific evidence supporting the antibiotic-driven increase in antibiotic resistant "superbugs" has been found.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/sep/19/superbug...

Antibiotics, and antibiotic resistance genes, have existed for an uncountable number of megayears. Antibiotic use by humans is probably not creating many new antibiotic resistance genes, if any at all. But is is driving the increase in bacteria that contain these genes, as well as encouraging the horizontal transmission of antibiotic resistance genes and the accumulation of multiple such genes in so-called "superbugs".

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-22757-1

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30248271/

https://genomemedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s1...

It's a fairly clear case of natural selection.

One of the biggest risk factors for a C. difficile infection is being treated with fluoroquinolones (ciprofloxacin, gemifloxacin, levofloxacin, moxifloxacin, norfloxacin, and ofloxacin), which are often used in outpatient settings.

> [MRSA] caused more than 100,000 deaths attributable to antimicrobial resistance in 2019.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methicillin-resistant_Staphylo...

>>you'd expect a superbug to have broken out

You'd expect it, and it has.

What about the whole super bug antibiotic resistant thing

There are some who propound a more nuanced approach:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35704698

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