So, in short, new antibiotics are still being developed, in two fields: combintion treatments, which is using multiple existing ineffective treatments against one another, and by cultivating new...
So, in short, new antibiotics are still being developed, in two fields: combintion treatments, which is using multiple existing ineffective treatments against one another, and by cultivating new strains, which are now being found thanks to a new breakthrough technique allowing us to actually cultivate the 99% of all bacteria which we were formerly unable to study, due to them not being lab-growable.
That said, this is all still a stopgap, and just one more thing on the ever mounting pile of problems and mistakes which are slowly turning from a hill to get over, into a cliff we jump off of. The two problems are more of the same, as well:
medicine is privatized and it simply isnt super profitable to invest in new antibiotics no matter the cost otherwise.
people are stupid, and both doctors and patients are people. Antibiotics are still massively overprescribed and while western nations (in addition to being, well, clean) are slowly taking steps to fix the problem, its only going to get WORSE if developing nations continue to develop in the way they have. Thats a big if, though, for reasons I wont get into.
Still, the situation is grim. My hot take? The world is too goddamn big and this is just another symptom of it. This is another problem that, like climate change, will have to start destroying wealthy, western lives in a big way before being addressed. Unfortunately, though, that body of wealth affected will also have the least amount of control over the antibiotics actually being used due to the developing world being the primary catalyst anyway. Which is all to say, things are sticky; unlike climate change, which will be slowly felt over the next 100+ years, things are going to get a lot, lot worse, very quickly, before they start to get better - and its going to take a major cultural shift before they even will.
While this is true and we should be reducing how much we prescribe antibiotics, feeding antibiotics to cattle and other ranch animals is a much more heinous use of antibiotics that we can very...
Antibiotics are still massively overprescribed
While this is true and we should be reducing how much we prescribe antibiotics, feeding antibiotics to cattle and other ranch animals is a much more heinous use of antibiotics that we can very easily do something about yet seem to ignore or overlook.
Surprised they didn't mention the alternative to antibiotics, bacteriophage treatments. Rather than using chemical compounds, phage therapy uses viruses to kill bacteria that are causing an...
Surprised they didn't mention the alternative to antibiotics, bacteriophage treatments. Rather than using chemical compounds, phage therapy uses viruses to kill bacteria that are causing an infection. It has the disadvantage of being narrowly targeted, in that a strain of phage will only go after a couple of species of bacteria, but since the viruses co-evolve with their bacterial hosts, they aren't susceptible to resistance in the same way antibiotics are. It's not a new technology either, while phage therapy isn't too well known in the west for whatever reason, it's been used in the former Soviet bloc countries for generations.
So, in short, new antibiotics are still being developed, in two fields: combintion treatments, which is using multiple existing ineffective treatments against one another, and by cultivating new strains, which are now being found thanks to a new breakthrough technique allowing us to actually cultivate the 99% of all bacteria which we were formerly unable to study, due to them not being lab-growable.
That said, this is all still a stopgap, and just one more thing on the ever mounting pile of problems and mistakes which are slowly turning from a hill to get over, into a cliff we jump off of. The two problems are more of the same, as well:
medicine is privatized and it simply isnt super profitable to invest in new antibiotics no matter the cost otherwise.
people are stupid, and both doctors and patients are people. Antibiotics are still massively overprescribed and while western nations (in addition to being, well, clean) are slowly taking steps to fix the problem, its only going to get WORSE if developing nations continue to develop in the way they have. Thats a big if, though, for reasons I wont get into.
Still, the situation is grim. My hot take? The world is too goddamn big and this is just another symptom of it. This is another problem that, like climate change, will have to start destroying wealthy, western lives in a big way before being addressed. Unfortunately, though, that body of wealth affected will also have the least amount of control over the antibiotics actually being used due to the developing world being the primary catalyst anyway. Which is all to say, things are sticky; unlike climate change, which will be slowly felt over the next 100+ years, things are going to get a lot, lot worse, very quickly, before they start to get better - and its going to take a major cultural shift before they even will.
While this is true and we should be reducing how much we prescribe antibiotics, feeding antibiotics to cattle and other ranch animals is a much more heinous use of antibiotics that we can very easily do something about yet seem to ignore or overlook.
Surprised they didn't mention the alternative to antibiotics, bacteriophage treatments. Rather than using chemical compounds, phage therapy uses viruses to kill bacteria that are causing an infection. It has the disadvantage of being narrowly targeted, in that a strain of phage will only go after a couple of species of bacteria, but since the viruses co-evolve with their bacterial hosts, they aren't susceptible to resistance in the same way antibiotics are. It's not a new technology either, while phage therapy isn't too well known in the west for whatever reason, it's been used in the former Soviet bloc countries for generations.