>Numerous health experts have warned that, without new antibiotics, the world risks a return to the medical dark ages, when the slightest knick or scratch could spawn a lethal infection that doctors had no way to treat.
The use of antibiotics in the agricultural industry has allowed farmers to raise animals in inhumane conditions with minimal sanitation. The CDC believes this is contributing to antibiotic resistance, and the FDA has only been able to recommend that farmers use the drugs "judiciously." [1] We effectively subsidize this industry on the back of future species-scale human suffering.
Our politicians have proven to be too shortsighted to do anything but hope for new discoveries, prioritizing short-term gains over a catastrophe that those with multi-drug-resistant infections are presently living through. This article does us a disservice by misrepresenting that discovering new antibiotics is the only way we can address this problem.
I agree this is a major and disgusting problem, however the article does mention this; albeit with a different assumed reason.
>farmers have pumped cattle and chickens full of antibiotics because they plump up the animals (possibly because the antibiotics kill benign gut bacteria that usually take some of the creatures’ daily calories for themselves).
> and the FDA has only been able to recommend that farmers use the drugs "judiciously." [1]
Given that FDA has a revolving door to the industry it controls (where CEOs of industry become regulators and vice-versa, just playing musical chairs basically), that is a pretty rational response.
They have both 1) done something "Oh look, we are warning them to be careful!" 2) haven't angered their ex or future board members.
The whole enterprise was/is bound for eventual failure unless perhaps you have nano particle drones that hunt for bacteria or perhaps a genetically engineered immune system to do the same, but I think bacteria will be up to the challenge of dealing with those too.
You are dealing with survivors that have been around for over a billion years. And all your hubris lasted you less than 100 years. If you think about it with any sort of intelligence or foresight, you see that this is a failed enterprise as it is. Drugs for everyone does not work, because that means that you are making the war against trillions of individual bacteria cells. Of coarse they will figure out a cure for your "anti-biotic", they are searching for it with all that they got.
Medical dark ages are inevitable. Bacteria are survivors just like we are survivors.
Bacteria may be survivors, but they don't have brains. We do. We've shown time and again that we can invent in a day what takes evolution millions of years. It's not unreasonable to expect we'll succeed, because we can adapt faster than they do. It's a matter of resource focus and not doing stupid things like feeding animals with antibiotics en masse.
Does not mean that they are not highly intelligent, especially in their home environment which we can only observe through a microscope. At the end of the day there is more of them in us than pretty much what is us... they have got lots of places to hide.
> We've shown time and again that we can invent in a day what takes evolution millions of years.
Some citation needed. Just because we extracted chemicals that have been used for millions of years and invented by yet other living organisms that had been battling them for millions of years does not mean we invented a damn thing. And we destroyed those discoveries in 10s of years.
> It's not unreasonable to expect we'll succeed
Succeed at what? Destroying all pathogenic bacteria all the time? We can't even do it some of the time currently. In the end the red queen will win... and this temporary war will lead to the same truce that's been going on since the dawn of life.
> Does not mean that they are not highly intelligent, especially in their home environment which we can only observe through a microscope. At the end of the day there is more of them in us than pretty much what is us... they have got lots of places to hide.
[citation needed]. There's nothing suggesting individual bacteria are anything more than dumb machines that react to external stimuli - or that as a group they do anything more than gradient search through DNA space.
> Some citation needed. Just because we extracted chemicals that have been used for millions of years and invented by yet other living organisms that had been battling them for millions of years does not mean we invented a damn thing. And we destroyed those discoveries in 10s of years.
I'm not talking about extracting chemicals. I'm talking about flying, Moon landings and popcorn. Keep in mind we went from nothing to genetic engineering in few thousand years, and arguably all the time but last few centuries were essentially not relevant to those advancements.
> Succeed at what?
Succeed at staying on top of damage done by pathogens, eventually advancing to the point we won't have to keep actively pushing that technology forward. Sure, bacteria will try to gradient-search around whatever we throw at them, but we don't have to make it easy for them. "Nano particle drones" are definitely not out of the question in the future, given that bacteria themselves are nothing more than dumb "nano particle drones".
The use of antibiotics in the agricultural industry has allowed farmers to raise animals in inhumane conditions with minimal sanitation. The CDC believes this is contributing to antibiotic resistance, and the FDA has only been able to recommend that farmers use the drugs "judiciously." [1] We effectively subsidize this industry on the back of future species-scale human suffering.
Our politicians have proven to be too shortsighted to do anything but hope for new discoveries, prioritizing short-term gains over a catastrophe that those with multi-drug-resistant infections are presently living through. This article does us a disservice by misrepresenting that discovering new antibiotics is the only way we can address this problem.
1. http://www.cdc.gov/narms/animals.html