cdc threat report: 'we will soon be in a post-antibiotic era'

[bcbm]

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/09/cdc-amr-rpt1/

[argeiphontes]

Terrible stuff. Back to the 19th century we could go... There need to be more social resources applies to stopping unnecessary prescribing and increasing patient compliance, as well as ending use of antibiotics in food animals.

But ultimately, organisms will evolve when selective pressures are placed on them. I've read that rats in New York develop resistance to the poisons used to kill them, so every few years they have to start using new ones.

edit: Non-antibiotic methods of combating these diseases will have to be developed sooner or later.

[Os Cangaceiros]

The article itself isn't nearly as doom-and-gloom as the article's title ;)

[Os Cangaceiros]

Although it is still kind of scary. Especially if you have to go to a hospital for surgery.

[Popular Front of Judea]

I am dreading the arrival of antibiotic resistant TB here. Russian jails are a petri dish for it.

[Red Commissar]

Although it is still kind of scary. Especially if you have to go to a hospital for surgery.

Yeah, hospital infections/ nosocomial infections have become so frequent that they're among the more common reasons why someone ends up having to stay long-term in a hospital. In many long term facilities (including nursing homes and other geriatric facilities), MRSA, c diff, and others has become a common disease among patients. It's greatly increasing the costs of providing care too unfortunately, which'd exacerbate our current system's preference for the more wealthy in access to medicine.

I should point the genes responsible for this kind of resistance didn't necessarily arise because the environment demanded it- this veers into lamarckian views on evolution and should be avoided. It's plausible that these kinds of mutants already existed but were never selected upon because it didn't confer any advantage, the particular sequence being retained and developed through some method of genetic drift over time. Being better fit to this new environment (antibiotic treatment) would have ended up causing these resistant strands to predominate due to selection. Some bacteria can also "share" their genes through plasmids with one another, a process called conjugation, which makes it difficult to track. That would lead into some epigenetic-related stuff.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

and, talking of the 19th century which someone mentioned above, we know who shitty healthcare impacts most...

Looks like we're gonna need a new Rowntree all over again.