The drugs don't work: what happens after antibiotics?

[nitpicker]

https://www.theguardian.com/global/2019/mar/24/the-drugs-dont-work-what-happens-after-antibiotics

The drugs don’t work: what happens after antibiotics?

Oliver Franklin-Wallis

Sun 24 Mar 2019 08.00 GMT

(snip)
Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) – the process of bacteria (and yeasts and viruses) evolving defence mechanisms against the drugs we use to treat them – is progressing so quickly that the UN has called it a “global health emergency”. At least 2 million Americans contract drug-resistant infections every year. So-called “superbugs” spread rapidly, in part because some bacteria are able to borrow resistance genes from neighbouring species via a process called horizontal gene transfer. In 2013, researchers in China discovered E coli containing mcr-1, a gene resistant to colistin, a last-line antibiotic that, until recently, was considered too toxic for human use. Colistin-resistant infections have now been detected in at least 30 countries.

“In India and Pakistan, Bangladesh, China, and countries in South America, the resistance problem is already endemic,” says Colin Garner, CEO of Antibiotic Research UK. In May 2016, the UK government’s Review on Antimicrobial Resistance forecast that by 2050 antibiotic-resistant infections could kill 10 million people per year – more than all cancers combined.

“We have a good chance of getting to a point where for a lot of people there are no [effective] antibiotics,” Daniel Berman, leader of the Global Health team at Nesta, told me. The threat is difficult to imagine. A world without antibiotics means returning to a time without organ transplants, without hip replacements, without many now-routine surgeries. It would mean millions more women dying in childbirth; make many cancer treatments, including chemotherapy, impossible; and make even the smallest wound potentially life-threatening. As Berman told me: “Those of us who are following this closely are actually quite scared.”
(snip)

In the early decades of antibiotics, resistance wasn’t a serious problem – we’d just find a new drug. After penicillin revolutionised healthcare on the battlefields of the Second World War, the pharmaceutical industry embarked on a golden era of antibiotic discovery. Companies enlisted explorers, missionaries and travellers from around the world to bring back soil samples in the hunt for novel compounds. Streptomycin was discovered in a field in New Jersey; vancomycin, the jungles of Borneo; cephalosporins from a sewage outlet in Sardinia.

But the golden age was short-lived. New discoveries slowed. Antibiotic compounds are common in nature, but ones that can kill bacteria without harming humans aren’t. Soon, big pharma companies began cutting funding to their antibiotic research departments before shutting them down altogether.
(snip)

There is still hope. In early 2015, researchers at Northeastern University in Massachusetts announced they had discovered a new class of antibiotics in a Maine field. Called teixobactin, it is produced by a newly discovered bacterium, Eleftheria terrae, and effective against a range of drug-resistant infections. Teixobactin was discovered by Slava Epstein and Kim Lewis, using an iChip, an ingenious device about the size of a USB chip designed to overcome a problem that has vexed biologists for decades: of the untold billions of bacteria in nature, only 1% of the species will grow in a Petri dish. “We came up with a simple gadget,” Lewis says. “You take bacteria from soil, sandwich it between two semi-permeable membranes, and essentially trick the bacteria.” So far the pair have identified around 80,000 previously uncultured strains using the device, and isolated several encouraging new antibiotics.

Teixobactin is particularly promising for a simple reason: to date, no bacteria have been able to develop resistance to it. “When we published the paper four years ago, a number of my colleagues wrote me emails saying: ‘Send me teixobactin, and I’ll send you back resistant mutants,’” Lewis says. “I’m still waiting.”
(snip)

[appalachiablue]

1. K & R. Good look at a major global threat and possible treatments & solutions.

The overuse of antibiotics especially in industrial factory farming and animal agriculture at a 70-80% rate in the last several decades isn't mentioned enough. Same for the senseless use in personal products like antibiotic- band aides, hand soap, Kleenex and more.

>Excerpt:"The problem is that today, antibiotics are everywhere, too. One in three of us is prescribed a course of antibiotics each year – a fifth of those needlessly, according to Public Health England.
For decades, many farmers have routinely injected livestock with antibiotics, as much to help fatten them up as to prevent infection (this practice is now banned in the EU, US and Canada.) “Our generation is besotted by the powers of antibiotics,” says Jim O’Neill, the economist behind the government’s review. “The problem is we use them for things that we shouldn’t need to.”