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Health officials in the US are sounding the alarm over drug-resistant bacteria
- asdff 1y agoSo is this news coming from the US health officials we can trust or the ones we can't?
- yawnxyz 1y agowe can trust it, but also we've been sounding the alarm for decades. it's just background noise now
- tayo42 1y ago[flagged]
- jfengel 1y agoIt doesn't have any prominent names attached, which means it's still the existing civil service types who are just trying to do their jobs. Which they'll keep doing, until they they get DOGEd. Or they can't take it any more.
- dyauspitr 1y agoI believe this is from the regular folks, not the MAGA brained ones.
- evan_ 1y agoThe MAGA health officials don't believe in germ theory so it's not them. https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/06/14/nx-s1-5429732/ancient-miasma-theory-may-help-explain-health-secretary-robert-f-kennedy-jr-s-vaccine-moves https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/06/14/nx...
- jt2190 1y ago“Changes in Carbapenemase-Producing Carbapenem-Resistant Enterobacterales, 2019 to 2023” https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/ANNALS-25-02404 https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/ANNALS-25-02404
- ChrisMarshallNY 1y agoThis isn’t news. The alarm bells have been clanging away for decades. One of the scariest, is drug-resistant TB. I understand there’s also drug-resistant leprosy, but that doesn’t transmit easily. I’m old enough to remember that penicillin cured almost everything. You started a 10-day course, and felt better in a day and a half. The problem was that many folks stopped taking it, when they felt better. These days, American meat is absolutely overflowing with antibiotics. I don’t know if there’s any kind of serious effort to address that.
- MountDoom 1y ago> The problem was that many folks stopped taking it, when they felt better. This really wasn't the problem. There was never any strong science behind it, other than just an abundance of caution. But you can also argue that taking antibiotics for an extra week is bad because it prolongs the evolutionary pressure on microbes to develop resistance. Either way, stuff like that is inconsequential. Most drug-resistant strains crop up in hospice and hospital settings where immunocompromised or gravely ill patients are kept on a cocktail of antibiotics for months or years, and resistant bacteria have a significant advantage and can spread easily. And it's not like we have a good alternative to that - "let more people die earlier" is not an easy sell. This is possibly followed by overuse of antibiotics in animal husbandry, although that part is more complicated than usually implied.
- Panzer04 1y agoI've heard it's actually just completely wrong. The earlier you stop taking antibiotics the faster the selective pressure for resistance goes away. stopping when you feel better might actually just be better, though I'd have to go find that reference again. Eg: https://www.bmj.com/content/358/bmj.j3418 https://www.bmj.com/content/358/bmj.j3418
- robbiep 1y agoThe difficulty is stopping when control of the organism is actually achieved, not just when you ‘feel better’. Most people are totally unable to make this judgement
- dboreham 1y agoSo now they believe in evolution?
- mlinhares 1y agoThese aren't the officials you're thinking about LOL.
- freakynit 1y agoIt’s an arms race between humans and bacteria. On one side, bacteria have short lifecycles and huge populations, letting them mutate quickly to evade antibiotics, vaccines, or immune defenses. On the other, humans don’t rely on slow genetic evolution - we adapt with medicine, vaccines, hygiene, and now faster tools like mRNA platforms. The danger isn’t that we'll be "out-evolved" forever, but that we have to keep innovating or fall behind.
- debo_ 1y agoOk, so we have Zerg and Terran. Now we just need something to fill in as Protoss. Somehow I don't think LLMs are it.
- s5300 1y ago[dead]
- burnt-resistor 1y agoThis is what happens with overprescription to patients who don't need them and exploiting life-saving drugs for ranchers and megacorps to make more money raising meat.
- Auracle 1y agoThere's a pretty simple solution to the lack of new antibiotics that I've never seen anyone suggest: up the amount of time that any new antibiotics are patented. Right now there's not much of an incentive to create new antibiotics. It's quite rare that something can't be taken out with the antibiotics we have, and while that's slowly getting worse it means that drug companies probably can't make back their investment by the time the drug goes generic. So, up it to 25 years or something like that. It's better we have some expensive drugs that work than none at all.
- SwtCyber 1y agoThis is one of those slow-moving crises that barely registers until it's very hard to contain