7 ms·

Antibiotic resistance is scarier than terrorism. A once-in-a-century terrorist attack killed 3000 people. TB still carries off more than a million people per ye

• carbocation 14y ago
  I'm with you on basically all points. For a good time, take a look at carbapenem-resistant enterobacteriaciae [1] and totally resistant TB [2]. Regarding the antibiotics, it's not completely clear why giving them to animals makes them bigger, and it may well not have anything to do with poor living conditions. It seems to work in humans, too, and these results were discovered as early as the 1940s [citation needed]. But those are just quibbles; on the key points, I'm with you. [1] http://www.cdc.gov/hai/organisms/cre/index.html http://www.cdc.gov/hai/organisms/cre/index.html [2] http://www.who.int/tb/challenges/mdr/tdrfaqs/en/index.html http://www.who.int/tb/challenges/mdr/tdrfaqs/en/index.html
  • dmiladinov 14y ago
    > Regarding the antibiotics, it's not completely clear why giving them to animals makes them bigger I think the explanation that I heard which sounds plausible is that the antibiotics free up a certain amount of energy in the organism that would have gone to fighting micro-organisms that can instead be applied to growth.
    • eru 14y ago
      Be very cautious with easy and intuitive explanations in biology.
  • ericb 14y ago
    Do antibiotics make people taller, fatter, or both?
  • arvin 14y ago
    > Regarding the antibiotics, it's not completely clear why giving them to animals makes them bigger From the 'Germs Are Us' article: "In August, Ilseung Cho, of the New York University School of Medicine, published a study showing that antibiotics eradicated bacteria, commonly found in the digestive system of mice, that help the animals metabolize calories efficiently; without the microbes, the mice absorbed more calories from the same amount of food and rapidly became obese." http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/10/22/121022fa_fact_specter?currentPage=all http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/10/22/121022fa_fact_...
• deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
  • carbocation 14y ago
    While your criticism is technically correct, when michaelochurch says "drug resistant MRSA", he's probably thinking of VISA/VRSA [1], which is more extensively (but not completely) resistant to the pharmacological armamentarium. [1] http://www.cdc.gov/HAI/organisms/visa_vrsa/visa_vrsa.html http://www.cdc.gov/HAI/organisms/visa_vrsa/visa_vrsa.html
  • michaelochurch 14y ago
    Good call. Thanks.
• nodata 14y ago
  But what do we do about it, when it seems that nobody at all cares?
  • carbocation 14y ago
    People care a ton about this, enough so that the FDA has released guidance on it and even industry magazines are talking about it [1]. This is a huge issue with major visibility in the health professions. [1] http://nationalhogfarmer.com/health/be-ready-antibiotic-restrictions http://nationalhogfarmer.com/health/be-ready-antibiotic-rest...
  • michaelochurch 14y ago
    Factory farming should be outlawed for a number of reasons. It's inhumane, devastating to the environment, and bad in a million other ways. It's not even efficient, except in jurisdictions that allow the farms to (freely) dump their effluent-- an externalized cost. Factory farms are literally putting huge quantities of shit into their local water tables. That would be a start. Then we put a ban on the sale, for human consumption, of animals that were treated with antibiotics. If you want to save your pet cat's life-- or your pig's-- that's fine. Just don't sell it as food. That's the low-hanging fruit. It will make meat slightly more expensive, but I'm okay with that. People in the developed world eat too much meat for their own health anyway. What remains is educating people about antibiotics so they stop asking for them when they get colds and flus (they don't do a damn bit of good for a viral infection). Doctors in the US tend to be over-liberal with the drugs, even knowing that they have no effect on viruses.
    • alvarosm 14y ago
      It's funny how everyone has solutions for our eating up the planet. But it's never the obvious: stop having children like there's no tomorrow. If you think you have the right to have 90 children if you feel so inclined, then you'll have to acknowledge the planet must turn into a massive farm.
      • dwiel 14y ago
• DanBC 14y ago
  MRSA is already drug resistant. That's what the MR bit is - methicillin resistant. > Probably the worst culprit is the abuse of antibiotics in factory farming. That's certainly a problem, but misuse of antibiotics in humans is still a big big problem. Antibiotics were routinely used for illnesses where they shouldn't have been - ear infections, viral coughs and colds. In developing nations people often use antibiotics in the worst way - a short course until they feel better, not a long course until the bacteria are all killed. This is partly because they don't know any better and partly because they buy what they can afford.
  • Smudge 14y ago
    > In developing nations people often use antibiotics in the worst way - a short course until they feel better, not a long course until the bacteria are all killed. This is partly because they don't know any better and partly because they buy what they can afford. I wish I could say this was limited to developing nations.
  • carbocation 14y ago
    > In developing nations people often use antibiotics in the worst way - a short course until they feel better, not a long course until the bacteria are all killed. This is partly because they don't know any better and partly because they buy what they can afford. This brings up an important topic in infectious diseases right now: in many cases, long courses of antibiotics increase selective pressure and favor the antibiotic-resistant bacteria. One strategy to reduce drug resistance is to (rationally) minimize duration of treatment [1]. This isn't to say that medication nonadherence is good, but it is to say that the field is moving towards a shorter duration of treatment for many infections. [1] http://cid.oxfordjournals.org/content/46/4/491.short http://cid.oxfordjournals.org/content/46/4/491.short
    • grhino 14y ago
      Yeah, I've always been suspicious of the phrase "until the bacteria are all killed". It sounds like a pleasant rationalization than an elegant simplification of the argument.
  • 14y ago
• jpdoctor 14y ago
  > "drug-resistant MRSA" Also antibiotic resistant c-diff. I have heard about klebsiella pneumoniae, but don't know any cases personally. Eventually, advanced societies will realize that immune systems need to be exercised just like the rest of the body, but good luck telling helicopter moms that Jr shouldn't have antibiotics for his ear ache.
• InclinedPlane 14y ago
  A point of correction: 9/11 may be an outlier but it's unfair to characterize it as a super unique event. Terrorist attacks routinely kill dozens and even hundreds of people, and this continues even today. Though such attacks are for the moment much less common in the developed world.
• enraged_camel 14y ago
  Factory farming is insanity, not just in its contribution to antibiotic resistance but also because of its devastating impacts on the environment. An article was published in December 2006 that described how Smithfield, America's largest pork meat producer, manages all the excrement from the 27 million hogs it slaughters every year. The article at the end is worth a read, but I'll give you a summary: 27 million hogs produce an unbelievable amount of shit. This shit is collected in what Smithfield calls "holding ponds" - which are actually lagoons - that can run 30 feet deep. These ponds contain many extremely toxic substances in addition to good old pig shit. Even light rains can cause them to overflow. And the stuff is so vicious that people are often overcome by the fumes and are hospitalized. And if someone falls into the stuff, they die. How does this stuff affect humans? Well, gravity causes the toxic material in the lagoons to seep down into the groundwater supplies. From there it arrives in people's sinks, showers, and drinking water. http://www.globalresearch.ca/pork-s-dirty-secret-the-nation-s-top-hog-producer-is-also-one-of-america-s-worst-polluters/13479 http://www.globalresearch.ca/pork-s-dirty-secret-the-nation-...
  • 10098 14y ago
    time to become a vegetarian
    • aethertap 14y ago
      Or switch to sustainably raised meat (that's the focus on my farm). No medication of any kind, animals live on managed pasture that requires no inputs other than sun, air, and water. Switching away from meat will certainly help to address the development of resistant microbes, but if you can make a switch instead to meat that was raised with regenerative pasture management practices, you can additionally have a large positive impact on many other environmental factors. Look for terms like "high-density grazing," "holistic grazing," "holistic management," or "management-intensive grazing (MIG)." This TED talk [1] covers some of the information, for more you can google around for the above terms (sorry I don't have a good link handy). Correctly managing grazing livestock can actually reverse desertification and trap tons of carbon per year per acre in the soil. Of course, doing it wrong can have the opposite effect, so if you go this route it's important to know whether your farmer is running his operation with land restoration in mind. Conventional vegetable production also comes with a slew of its own problems (breeding of herbicide-resistant weeds [2] being something closely related to the topic at hand). Eating in a way that doesn't cause harm is a tricky thing these days. [1] - http://www.ted.com/talks/allan_savory_how_to_green_the_world_s_deserts_and_reverse_climate_change.html http://www.ted.com/talks/allan_savory_how_to_green_the_world... [2] - http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/10/121002092839.htm http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/10/121002092839.ht... *edited for formatting
• adventured 14y ago
  I agree, although the real once-in-a-century attack that obviously concerns people for the next century is a nuclear attack, or a biological attack, that kills hundreds of thousands or millions (not to mention killing technology that is likely to exist in the next century that we can't imagine today). The prior century was extremely limiting for terrorists by comparison to what the next century is likely to make possible.