Hello Captain Trips: The risk is real: ‘We have already run out of antibiotics’ according to experts

[Katashi_itto]

Humans face the very real risk of a future without antibiotics, a world of plummeting life expectancy where people die from diseases easily treatable today, scientists say.

Experts tracking the rise of drug resistance say years of health gains could be rolled back by mutating microbes that make illnesses more difficult and expensive to cure and carry a higher risk of death.

Some say the threat to wellbeing is on the scale of global warming or terrorism — yet resistance is being allowed to spread through an entirely preventable means — improper use of antibiotics.


“It is a major public health problem,” Patrice Courvalin, who heads the Antibacterial Agents Unit of France’s Pasteur Institute, told AFP.

“It is about more than not being able to treat a disease. It will erase much progress made in the last 20-30 years.”

Without antibiotics to tackle opportunistic bacteria that pose a particular risk for people who are very ill, major surgery, organ transplants or cancer and leukaemia treatment may become impossible, he explained.
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/01/19/the-risk-is-real-we-have-already-run-out-of-antibiotics-according-to-experts/

[Warren Stupidity]

1. Big Pharma Yawns at this distraction.

Aint no money in antibiotics.

[laundry_queen]

2. Basically

sure illustrates the problems with having only for profit corporations in charge of R&D for new medicines.

[Mariana]

4. They are making some money

selling antibiotics in vast quantities to be given to livestock that doesn't need it.

When all the antibiotics that are available have become largely useless, then they'll work on developing some new ones - and you can bet the new ones will be very expensive indeed.

[jmowreader]

3. I really don't like the way this is is worded

We have plenty of antibiotics. The problem is, way too many people demanded high-powered ones to kill bacteria that would have succumbed to penicillin then stopped taking them before the bottle was empty. The old phrase "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger" is operative here. There's also the problem of people trying to kill viruses with antibiotics, which doesn't work at all.

Now we have bacteria that Cipro won't kill.

[El_Johns]

5. "The problem is..." No, it's not.

The problem is that big ag demanded routine antibiotics for livestock to promote growth, decrease loss & increase profits.

The meme that antibiotic resistance is the result of patients "demanding" high powered antibiotics when they didn't need them is BS.

First, doctors aren't obligated to give patients medicines they don't need just because patients "demand" them (try that with a morphine script & see how far you get).

Second, the scope of humans taking antibiotics is absolutely dwarfed by the scope of animals being fed them routinely.

According to the
1999 NAHMS Feedlot Report,
83% of feedlots used some antimicrobials in feed
or water.
Almost 100% of feedlots of all
sizes surveyed in the study used injectable antibiotics as part
of a therapeutic regimen for BRD.

http://www.vido.org/beefinfonet/animalhealth/biosecurity/FeedlotAntibiotics.pdf


Antibiotic-resistant Escherichia coli in 300 feedlot steers receiving subtherapeutic levels of antibiotics was investigated through the collection of 3,300 fecal samples over a 314-day period. Antibiotics were selected based on the commonality of use in the industry and included chlortetracycline plus sulfamethazine (TET-SUL), chlortetracycline (TET), virginiamycin, monensin, tylosin, or no antibiotic supplementation (control).

The findings of the present study indicated that subtherapeutic administration of tetracycline in combination with sulfamethazine increased the prevalence of tetracycline- and AMP-resistant E. coli in cattle. However, resistance to antibiotics may be related to additional environmental factors such as diet.



http://aem.asm.org/content/74/14/4405


Feedlot operations have been using antibiotics on an ever-growing scale since the 50s.

[BrotherIvan]

6. This!

And it has run off into our waterways and infected every part of farming because the residuals that transfer to into other areas by spraying feces as fertilizer, etc. Children who have never orally taken antibiotics test positive for them. This is one of those public health things that we cannot afford to look the other way, but everyone will because profits!

[KT2000]

7. In 1928 when Fleming

discovered penicillin, he warned of antibiotic resistance because he had already found it in his early research. The majority of antibiotics we are exposed to are in the food supply - meat products. Some of these animals already harbor antibiotic resistant bacteria.

This huge increase in use was done with the knowledge that antibiotic resistance is a real threat. Even now, with proof in our hospitals every day, the best that was done was to discourage the use of antibiotics in animals raised for human consumption.
They will not stop using the antibiotics because it saves money.
It is the "free market' at work.

[El_Johns]

8. Yet another example of the unexpensed externalities involved in the pursuit of profit -- which the

public winds up paying for every time, sometimes with their lives.

[KT2000]

9. Yes!

I do environmental work and I always try to make the point of "cost shifting" especially regarding health effects.

[El_Johns]

11. It's my opinion that there can be no such thing as profit. It always comes out of someone

else's pocket, by exploiting labor, exploiting environment, exploiting taxpayers, etc. Or outright theft.

[KT2000]

12. and outright murder

When possible, I try to make the point that chemicals that affect the development of the fetus and young people is theft too. How many children have had their lives compromised by chemicals that we KNOW are causing them harm that lasts their entire life - neurological damage, cancer etc.

But what I have found is that people only understand dollar amounts and until they are shown the true costs they just don't get it. We need more studies that show those true costs.

[El_Johns]

13. +1

[avebury]

10. It might be Mother Nature's way of

reducing the destructive human population on this planet in order to give all other life forms a chance to survive.