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No this is not the same. Antibiotics kill bacteria, across the board, indiscriminately. Bacteria can evolve protection from antibiotics. It is not clear that th
by spywaregorilla 4y ago
No this is not the same. Antibiotics kill bacteria, across the board, indiscriminately. Bacteria can evolve protection from antibiotics. It is not clear that this will help out compete the rest. Taking antibiotics for a minor cold can cause antibiotic resistance to appear in OTHER bacteria unrelated to the cold.
Vaccines are specific to the thing they prevent.
- generalizations 4y ago> Antibiotics kill bacteria, across the board, indiscriminately. That is not true. You're probably thinking of broad-spectrum antibiotics, which are not the only kind. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broad-spectrum_antibiotic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broad-spectrum_antibiotic
- spywaregorilla 4y agoThis is the second time you've posted a link to wikipedia that you don't seem to really understand. Yes, it is true that there are narrow spectrum antibiotics. However, it is normative to assume that broad spectrum antibiotics are the things we refer to when we refer to antibiotics in the context of overuse fostering antibiotic resistance. You can't blindly give narrow spectrum antibiotics and expect it to do anything. It's the broad spectrum stuff that you see everywhere. Things like cattle especially. The fact that there are other more niche types of antibiotics doesn't materially change anything about the argument being made here.
- Izkata 4y ago> Vaccines are specific to the thing they prevent. Exactly. Have you not heard all the stuff about "vaccine-escape" variants of sars-cov-2? This is what we're talking about.
- spywaregorilla 4y agoAnd that is not really a big deal at all. We can just adjust the vaccines for the next dominant strain. We cannot simply adjust antibiotics when we facilitate antibiotic resistance by using them for trivial cases.