Therefore, much like the potentially developing WW3 in Ukraine, or Ebola outbreak in Africa, or rape culture in India, this kind of news is fairly useless. It just creates negative feelings with no positive outcome.
I'm happy to be convinced otherwise - what can I do about this?
If more informed I feel like the public could do a bit better at turning down Antibiotics when they aren't necessary, and using them properly when they are. Just that action would go a long way.
Edit- I would also like to add that a lot of people don't realize just how easy it is to get an infection, and education could go a long way in keeping it from happening in the first place. It reminds me of that guy on reddit with the horrible case of necrotizing fasciitis that he ended up with after retrieving a football from a koi pond. His day by day imgur chronicle was both interesting and horrifying.
Call your representatives [US: 0,1] or regional government representative (I just called my senator, and on hold for house rep now), tell them we need an emergency crash program to develop new, tightly-regulated antibiotics so that infection doesn't become the leading cause of deaths in 2025. Because it takes years and billions to develop new antibiotics, this is something companies will not pursue on their own initiative. If not, it'll be a return to the 19th century. Good luck with that.
[0] http://www.house.gov/representatives/find/
[1] http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_c...
The government needs to provide incentive for antibiotic research, right now regulatory and reimbursement issues are making the therapeutic area very unattractive.
The misuse that terrifies me the most are antibiotics used on livestock. Particularly the antibiotics that are also used on humans. In my opinion antibiotics should not be used as a growth promoter and only used to help sick animals.
The issue is that a lot of animals get sick from being crammed together in small areas, unable to move, while living in their own feces and urine. If we regulated animal treatment better and required certain living conditions for animals they wouldn't get sick nearly as often and wouldn't need nearly as many antibiotics.
As it stands, regulating antibiotics to be used only on sick animals wouldn't change much since an incredibly large percentage of livestock are often sick (as a consequence of living conditions).
New mechanisms of action are needed, more specifically, mechanisms that evolution cannot biologically defeat. Consider an agent like bleach, 99.99% effective because the makeup of a cell does not really permit it to protect against such a caustic agent. Clearly bleach can't be used as an antiobitic but I use it to illustrate the point that a evolutionary-unlikely antibiotic mechanism would be worldly profound.
This is really the alpha and the omega of antibiotics and antiviral research: finding the specific lethal target that can't easily be changed. It's damned hard, and it's why most of our antibiotics have been generated by nature, not by rational design.
It's easy to kill bacteria, viruses, cancer, you name it. We have lots of tools that can kill them, from guns to flame throwers to acid. The trick is killing them without also killing the patient, as you say.
I'll go so far as to say that we've found all of the important bacterial targets (e.g., ribosome, peptidoglycan, DNA gyrase & a few others).
That's probably an overstatement....but I (and many others) spent a large amount of time/$/effort looking for antibacterial targets that might have been overlooked. In the end, my conclusion was that we've already found the softest, most vulnerable targets within bacteria and we've known about them for a long time.
What to do? I think 2 things. Find new ways to hit the existing validated targets (people are doing this, but it ain't easy). The only other "idea" that I've had (and I'm sure others have had it, too), is that maybe we can find multiple "weak" targets that, when hit in combination, are just as good at inactivating a single "thing" like the bacterial ribosome. But that's probably even more difficult than finding new ways to hit well-validated targets.
Do you really want to help? Start eating less meat, and tell others to also do so. Tell them why. Tell them to also tell others. When there is less demand for meat, then there will be less land devoted to animal feed/grazing, and more to food crops. Less animals that can be infected, less antibiotics used, etc, etc.
Want to really help solve it? Don't eat meat. Get others to stop eating meat.
Invest in faux/lab-grown meat companies. Disease free meat can be grown. We just need to make it profitable.
Honestly, this is the future. Farming like this is unsustainable, not only for the antibiotic reasons.
(I'll spare everyone the ethical/transhumanist discussion.)
Why not just get meat from farms that treat their animals properly (no cramming, free-range, etc)? I don't think it should be this extreme.
"People were generally aware of the link between overuse of antibiotics and increased resistance. Only 8% of respondents did not agree that if antibiotics are taken too often they are less likely to work in the future. But many people (43%) incorrectly believed that antibiotics were effective in viral conditions."
I'd like to believe that buying meat / other foods that aren't treated with antibiotics could make a difference as well, but I'm not sure how much impact that would have.
I think you can help by informing others. If you know a family member not completing their course of antibiotics for example explain to them why it's so important.
What can the general public do about this? It's not like I can go to my family physician and tell him to use less antibiotics (he already doesn't; I'm in the Netherlands), and expect to make any kind of meaningful difference. This is one of those "tragedy of the commons" kind of problems that can only be solved if everybody cooperates.