3 ms·
There may be a lot of antibiotics present in the soil which haven't been exploited yet because it's hard to grow in the lab the organisms which produce them. Ho
by umberway 10y ago
There may be a lot of antibiotics present in the soil which haven't been exploited yet because it's hard to grow in the lab the organisms which produce them. However techniques are being developed to circumvent this problem and here's an early discovery:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teixobactin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teixobactin
Hopefully other and fundamentally newer ways to fight infection will be found. In the mean time getting fit and healthy now seems like a slightly wiser choice than it already was.
- candiodari 10y agoI don't think this is true. When we initially found out about antibiotics, in about 15 years we got to about 5 working general purpose antibiotics (general = works against pretty much every pathogen). Since then we've found 1 more, in over 70 years. Even if this new drug turns out to be a total success, counting on finding new drugs in the near future seems to be an extremely long shot. It's not going to happen. Rates of discovery predict availability of future drugs. Furthermore the rate at which bacteria adapt to drugs has also increased. Adaptation happens faster and faster. While I don't know how that applies to this particular drug, a naive extrapolation would seem to indicate it won't last half a decade.
- guftagu 10y agoThat is completely false. Just a Google search will reveal to you that dozens of new antibiotics have been found since but they didn't last long. BTW, Penicillin also lasted less than a year before bacteria developed resistance to it.
- candiodari 10y agoWell it's not false once you consider that those "dozens" are tiny variations of the existing ones.