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World without antibiotics
- manmal 9y agoThere are surely alternatives/augmentations to antibiotics. One that comes to mind is that exposure to certain blue light wavelengths kills germs (as recently discovered by the anti-acne industry). They could irradiate the operated tissue with intense blue light (plus maybe red light to lessen inflammation) before sewing up. And near infrared therapy (LLLT or even LED) would deal with a lot of inflammation post-op. A quite cheap option actually.. it would of course not prevent all infections, but sure a lot of them. ADDED Since people seem to have trouble with the antibacterial claim, here is an article: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/23009190/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/23009190/ Just google “pubmed blue light antimicrobial”.
- adrianN 9y agoI'm pretty sure that if it were as simple as shining some light on tissue we wouldn't use antibiotics, since they come with pretty strong side-effects. Even supposing that the light really kills germs, the light won't reach all spots in the wound and it wouldn't reach the bacteria that already entered the bloodstream.
- manmal 9y agoSome light wavelengths do kill germs, this is well established (EDIT: And I don't even mean UV light, but other, visible wavelengths). Just google it up, there's lots of papers. And big cos like Neutrogena offer inexpensive devices that effectively kill bacteria responsible for acne - that's no proof, but for me an indicator that this has arrived in the mainstream. You are right that light might only kill bacteria on tissue surface. But this is exactly where surgeons need it! My grandfather died of complications caused by a resistant strain infection after hip surgery. What happened is that bacteria from the environment entered the wound before it was sealed. Sure, you won't remotely kill all germs, but you might make an otherwise deadly infection manageable. Just because it's not yet done, does not mean it's BS.
- KaiserPro 9y agoYou are confusing anti-septic with antibiotic. Cleaning things _before_ you operate is relativly easy. Iodine/bleach/listerene/arsenic/ozone will all kill bacteria on surfaces. Why antibiotics are great is that they can be taken orally and they kill bacteria _inside_, but not your body. UV/blue light is indescriminate, you can swallow a blue light pill and expect it to descriminate between your body and non-local bacteria
- tremon 9y agoWhy antibiotics are great is that they can be taken orally and they kill bacteria _inside_, but not your body. FCVO "your body". Antibiotics definitely do kill gut bacteria, which many consider to be part of our bodies.
- KaiserPro 9y agoyes, it does, which is a side effect, however unlike anti septic it doesn't total the intestine wall, and anything else behind it. For example Arsenic is a brilliant antibiotic, its just it kills you _and_ the infection. what we call antibiotics are far more diserning.
- thfuran 9y agoWhich really is a shame. I think the terminology ought to be the other way around.
- manmal 9y agoI'm not talking about UV light, see my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16113533 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16113533
- KaiserPro 9y agoWhich isn't the point I'm making. Topical treatments for a few genus of bacteria are _not_ a viable alternative
- hycaria 9y agoInflammation is an important response to fight infections actually, the problem is when it gets out of control (or is too annoying to deal with). But it's not good either to shut it down completely. (Your comment seemed quite confused in that regard).
- manmal 9y agoPlease read up on LLLT - inflammation is not just shut down, but rather mediated. Eg blood flow is increased, energy production in cells is improved by various means (cytochrome-c-oxidase, and also pushing out of nitric oxide). I haven’t seen a good explanation of why exactly inflammation is reduced, but a very consistent finding is that wound healing is sped up and pain is reduced, often by factor 2.
- Angostura 9y agoWhat you propose is rather similar to suggesting that we drink bleach. Yes UV kills bacteria, it also kills mammalian cells.
- manmal 9y agoBlue light is not UV. Yes, shining strong UV-B light on tissue causes DNA damage. I’m talking about the visible blue part of light spectrum. Eg 470nm: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/23009190/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/23009190/
- DoreenMichele 9y agoExcellent read. But it leaves me shaking my head. If the world is so desperate for answers to this problem, why do I continue to be ignored and crapped on? And it's generally viewed as bad form for me to express such thoughts. And I don't understand that either.
- Rescis 9y ago> And it's generally viewed as bad form for me to express such thoughts. And I don't understand that either. What thoughts are you referencing here?
- Double_a_92 9y agoNo Patrick, homeopatic sugar is not a solution to that. No... Being vegan is also not a solution. And neither is cannabis oil.
- DoreenMichele 9y agoMy name isn't Patrick and I don't do any of the things you listed.
- a_t48 9y agoI think he's making a Spongebob Squarepants reference.
- DoreenMichele 9y agoWow. Okay. Googling that is pretty freaking insulting.
- Double_a_92 9y agoWhat do you do then?
- DoreenMichele 9y agoNothing I want to discuss with someone being openly insulting to me in violation of the guidelines and not apologizing, especially given that two of my comments here have been downvoted to the negatives and your insult has not been flagged to death. I consider that evidence of a hostile atmosphere, which is par for the course and in no way surprising, much to my frustration. I would like to think 8.5 years of proving I am competent, not the attention monger people assume me to be etc would be worth more than that. But it isn't.
- cageface 9y agoMakes you wonder why we allow the animal agriculture industry to jack up their profits with wildly excessive overuse of antibiotics and externalize the cost onto the rest of us, not only in terms of dollars but in terms of loss of access to fundamental and essential medical procedures.
- jopsen 9y agoYeah, we won't need rationing for humans if we just stop overuse in agriculture. Credits to the EU for regulation this aggressively.. I even think the US is doing something: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antibiotic_use_in_livestock https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antibiotic_use_in_livestock As with climate change, this is probably going to hit emerging economies the hardest.. due to lack of regulation and less ability to deal with cost of workarounds.
- hycaria 9y agoWow wow wow, are you kidding ? You must be one of those regulators that constantly press breeders and veterinarians over lowering antibiotics usage in livestock, yet risible efforts in comparison are made in human medicine. Let's use latest generation antibiotics for the smallest procedures ! Who cares ?! Literally everyone is doing something about it in animal care (in the EU we lost availability of many specialties, or some are now usable only after antibiograms), yet it doesn't get better because MDs don't do shit. And what can they do after all, people can just go and find another practitioner. I just hope that with such reasoning you're ready to have your animal protein have its price tripled then or see your dog die of pneumonia, because that's what we're coming to. Or maybe everyone needs to brace themselves and endure having a cold for 2 more days and not resort to antibiotics for every little thing, or we will soon leave our YOPI (young, old, pregnant, immunosuppressed) to dying with no available care. By our current state of overpopulation, it's not a big deal after all.
- alkonaut 9y agoWhat's your point? That the EU banning antibiotics in healthy livestock is a bad thing, because it drives up meat prices? I'm completely happy with meat prices where I live and our ban on antibiotics for growth (i.e. in health animals) predates the EU regulation. > Or maybe everyone needs to brace themselves and endure having a cold for 2 more days and not resort to antibiotics for every little thing The reduction in antibiotic use here by doctors is also pretty noticable. I certainly don't get antibiotics prescribed for every little thing. Also, it's important to remember that while doctors might seem like they throw antibiotics at every patient, they typically prescribe the same very narrow antibiotics for everyone and use broad spectrum ones more restrictively (which is a good thing). It would be terrible if people could buy broad spectrum antibiotics over the counter.
- tzahola 9y agoBacteriophages!
- pmontra 9y agoAn order of magnitudes less important consequence of the end of antibiotics would be the end of professional sports and possibly also amateur sports. Probably not a big impact on baseball or cricket (but I don't know much about them), but any contact sport, bicycle races, motor sport, climbing, etc has a good chance of generating large scratches and injuries (broken bones, torn tendons, etc) that result in surgical treatment. How many football players (both the American and the rest of the world varieties) would survive a full career, from childhood to mid 30s? And there is some crash at almost every single pro bicycle race, with broken collarbones and/or patches of skin peeled off by sliding on the tarmac. Again, how may of them would make it into the 40s without antibiotics? Amateurs go cycling for fun on Sunday morning. They also crash. A broken collarbone is bad, but risking the life for a scratch is much worse.
- jdietrich 9y ago>An order of magnitudes less important consequence of the end of antibiotics would be the end of professional sports and possibly also amateur sports. Nope. Penicillin was first produced in quantity in 1942. The first Tour de France was held in 1903. Six-day track racing dates back to 1878. The Bordeaux-Paris race started in 1891 and was motor-paced for most of its history - the riders would slipstream behind cars or motorcycles, achieving tremendous speeds. The inadequate brakes and tires and the poor road surfaces of that era made road racing far more hazardous than it is today. Pre-war riders sometimes died from racing-related trauma and exhaustion, but most of them lived to a ripe old age. Antibiotic resistance is clearly a bad thing, but it has been hyped to the point of hysteria by people who don't take the long view. People didn't swaddle themselves in cotton wool before 1942, they just got on with life. Some of them died of sepsis, but poor hygiene was a far more significant cause than the lack of antibiotics.
- King-Aaron 9y agoAnecdotally, I've crashed my rally car a couple of times, fallen off my road bike many more times, and wrecked myself pretty hard surfing a couple of times - though I can't recall being fed antibiotics for any of those situations. Anecdote aside, I have the feeling that you'd find more people succumbing to lifestyle ailments than not if you were to (hypothetically) ban all kinds of physical activity.
- staticelf 9y agoThis always scares me and I think it isn't covered in mainstream media enough. When you say this to people, often they don't believe you.
- moppl 9y agoThere exists an alternative to antibiotics since it's very beginnings. It is the bacteriophages therapy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phage_therapy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phage_therapy It is practiced since the 20ies in Tiblisi Georgia. TED talk about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjH6m5VuR6I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjH6m5VuR6I So it is not all doomsday.
- mrarjen 9y agoI was thinking this as well. It seems rather promising as a partial replacement at first. Hope that this will offer solutions to the antibiotics problem long term.
- xefer 9y agoOn a tangential note, that "Phage therapy" Wikipedia page makes reference to the Sinclair Lewis book "Arrowsmith": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrowsmith_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrowsmith_(novel) I found it to be one more the more inspirational books I had read as a young student.
- QAPereo 9y agoThere are serious limitations to the current application of phage therapy, not the least of which is the need to positively identify a given strain you want to attack. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phage_therapy#Obstacles https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phage_therapy#Obstacles
- JoshTko 9y agoIsn't this potentially a feature? In that you won't be promoting resistance in non target bacteria? Seems that this would force much less over-prescription.
- keevie 9y agoThat does seem like an advantage, but the downside is that people who don't have access to fancy diagnostic equipment potentially just die of things that could be cured with some antibiotics....
- Angostura 9y agoThere was an interesting piece on BBC radio 4 a few months ago looking at the problems with the market when it comes to developing new antibiotics and I suspect government intervention will be needed to help the market along. The usual model of drug development is Spot opportunity > spend lots on R&D > Go into production > maximise sales > recoup money as soon as possible > Profit! However, with new antibiotics we, as society absolutely do not want them to maximise sales. Ideally we don't want any production at all. At worst, we'd like it to be used in a handful of cases for 5, 10 or 20 years, keeping it as a treatment of last resource. In such circumstances you can see the problem for the pharmaceuticals. Personally, I think there needs to be some kind of prize fund that can let the companies recoup (and make a decent profit) from antibiotic discoveries. Either that or public-sector research.
- KaiserPro 9y agowell, its not just that, tip-top cancer drugs can be > $70,000 a course of treatment (at NHS prices, so in the USA it'll be >$215,000) "expensive" antibiotics are $10-$1000 per course.
- adrianN 9y agoI feel like a lot more drug research should be state funded. Increasingly often we hear about some miraculous new drug that costs an arm and a leg and literally bankrupts people who need it. I understand that pharma corporations need to recoup the massive R&D costs, but it seems morally reprehensible to restrict treatment to the rich.
- hashmymustache 9y agoThe alternative to a $50k drug can be a $100k stay in the ICU.
- halo 9y agoI've long wondered why there isn't a significant levy (say $15) on existing antibiotics that goes into a fund for the development and release of new drugs. All antibiotic users benefit from new antibiotics, it would discourage overuse of existing antibiotics and provide significant funding for development. A few large western countries working together and such a fund would quickly reach hundreds of millions of dollars.
- vt100 9y agoMaybe we should stop randomly giving antibiotics to chickens in order to make them bigger
- wolco 9y agoWhen is this going to stop?
- googletazer 9y agoThis
- sebringj 9y agoThis was on TED where it demonstrated using Ultraviolet wavelengths at a particular frequency that didn't cause skin cancer but only killed surface bacteria. https://www.ted.com/talks/david_brenner_a_new_weapon_in_the_fight_against_superbugs https://www.ted.com/talks/david_brenner_a_new_weapon_in_the_... we good
- MollyR 9y agoA world without antibiotics is also a world with very limited surgeries.