3 ms·
Wide spread antibiotic resistance is just a matter of time. And it's not just people not following strict instruction on how long to take antibiotics. It's also
by biohacker42 17y ago
Wide spread antibiotic resistance is just a matter of time.
And it's not just people not following strict instruction on how long to take antibiotics. It's also farming.
And it's going to be a different world when antibiotics stop working. Well, same world we had before penicillin.
- rsheridan6 17y agoWhat's to stop us from developing new antibiotics that will be able to beat antibiotics? It looks to me more like a never-ending arms race.
- biohacker42 17y agoGood point. But I hope in the near future out ability to develop new antibiotics speeds up. So far we've mostly borrowed pre-existing compounds from fungi and soil bacteria.
- rsheridan6 17y agoI'm way outside my area of expertise here, but I would think that as chemistry modeling improves it would become easier to rationally modify a molecule, or design one from scratch, that could either kill a bug or disable the beta-lactamases, or whatever, that the bugs use to disable older antibiotics. I don't know how far off that is now. It might even be possible now. I do know that there aren't strong incentives for pharmaceutical companies to develop antibiotics. There's a lot more money in coming up with some new statin that lots of people will take for 20 years than a life-saving antibiotic that will be taken for 10 days by a smaller number of patients - especially when hospitals practice "antimicrobial stewardship," meaning that they don't prescribe newer, better antibiotics unless they think the old ones won't do.