Imagining the Post-Antibiotic Future 453
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Health authorities have been struggling to convince the public that the threat of totally drug-resistant bacteria is a crisis. Earlier this year, British chief medical officer Sally Davies described resistance to antibiotics as a 'catastrophic global threat' that should be ranked alongside terrorism. In September, Dr. Thomas Frieden, the director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, issued a blunt warning: 'If we're not careful, we will soon be in a post-antibiotic era. For some patients and some microbes, we are already there.' Now Maryn McKenna writes that we are on the verge of entering a new era in history and asks us to imagine what our lives would be like if we really lost antibiotics to advancing drug resistance. We'll not just lose the ability to treat infectious disease; that's obvious. But also: The ability to treat cancer, and to transplant organs, because doing those successfully relies on suppressing the immune system and willingly making ourselves vulnerable to infection. We'll lose any treatment that relies on a permanent port into the bloodstream — for instance, kidney dialysis. We'd lose any major open-cavity surgery, on the heart, the lungs, the abdomen. We'd lose implantable devices: new hips, new knees, new heart valves. We'd lose the ability to treat people after traumatic accidents, as major as crashing your car and as minor as your kid falling out of a tree. We'd lose the safety of modern childbirth. We'd lose a good portion of our cheap modern food supply because most of the meat we eat in the industrialized world is raised with the routine use of antibiotics, to fatten livestock and protect them from the conditions in which the animals are raised. 'And it wouldn't be just meat. Antibiotics are used in plant agriculture as well, especially on fruit. Right now, a drug-resistant version of the bacterial disease fire blight is attacking American apple crops,' writes McKenna. 'There's currently one drug left to fight it.'"
Re:Oh nos, terrorists! (Score:5, Funny)
Saying something is as scary as terrorism is like saying it's as dangerous as marijuana.
Marihuana? The Mexican devil-loco-weed? Assassin of youth? A cause of homicidal mania in our formerly upstanding young men of good character, and most widely used by the Negro, to stoke its lust for depraved violation of White Womanhood?
Truly a terrifying threat, sir!
(This post brought to you by the 1930s)
Re:terrorism! ha! (Score:4, Funny)
Well, it's your fault for not being effective anymore, fuzzyfuzzyfungus.
Re:terrorism! ha! (Score:5, Funny)
Some of us have been running a largely successful antibiotic R&D program for much of our ~1.5 billion year history, while occasionally taking time out of our busy schedules to help keep those lazy 'plants' alive [nih.gov] and produce the bread that gives you the energy to sustain life and the ethanol that allows you to endure it.
Others, who I am too tactful to name, spent almost a decade trying to copy our homework, between 1928 and 1938, and after a whole 75 years are on the verge of totally fucking up at antibiotic R&D and regressing to 19th century bacterial morbidity and mortality levels.
But no, I get it, I'm the ineffective one. Sorry about that, all my fault.
Re:Hypocritical (Score:5, Funny)
No, McDonald's has no meat or plant matter in their food, so it doesn't apply.
Re:What will researchers do next (Score:4, Funny)
Nobody is as cynical about scientists and scientific institutions and their desire to frighten government into giving them money than I am.
I agree, the tendency to exaggerate problems by scientists has reached the state of a crisis. Soon we won't know what to believe anymore!!
This is why I am applying for an urgent grant to study the effect of made up crises on academic research.
Re:Oh nos, terrorists! (Score:5, Funny)
That is pretty dangerous. I knew this guy who had some marijuana. People came to his house with guns, took it from him, made him cut off his dread locks, and then he had to pay some guy in a suit to negotiate for him so they wouldn't put him in a cage.
Marijuana is really dangerous. Stay away from that stuff.