Global Biological Experiment Generates Exciting New Results 340
New submitter hoboroadie writes "Scientific American Magazine says antibiotic-resistance genes have moved from the incubators of our hospitals and factory farms, and are spreading through diverse species in the wild. Resistance genes have been detected in crows, gulls, houseflies, moths, foxes, frogs, sharks and whales, as well as in sand and coastal water samples from California and Washington. This stuff is getting more and more like a Hollywood script everyday, n'est ce pas?"
But.. (Score:5, Insightful)
We had a half a percent higher profit margin on cattle for a couple decades. That's totally worth having permanent incurable deadly diseases. Tragedy of the commons sucks balls, and time and again, it turns out that the "invisible hand" won't develop any solution to it.
Re:But.. (Score:5, Funny)
The ghosts of Friedrich Hayek and Ayn Rand find your lack of Market faith disturbing.
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Re:But.. (Score:5, Insightful)
First of all, the regulation of the health care industry is to the side of this issue. The largest driver for resistance is the over-use of antibiotics in non-health care related fields, like industrial agriculture, and hand soap.
The market forces here are the desire for higher meat production (ie, more profit!) as well as the marketability of antibiotics to consumers that don't realize that you don't need or want antibiotics everywhere.
Where the market forces completely and utterly fail is that the very high cost of widespread antibiotic resistance is NOT being directly felt by the industries that are using them the most. It is in fact a very nice example of where pure capitalism fails - large, long-term, external costs are not felt by the people making short term profits.
Re:But.. (Score:4, Informative)
Mod parent up. This is one of the most insightful comments I've seen on Slashdot today; it both gets to the root of the matter, and generalizes well to many related issues.
Re:But.. (Score:4, Insightful)
At least in the US, there's an underlying sentiment of anti-intellectualism and "my opinion is just as valid as your knowledge", and a lot of people who just straight out don't trust scientists because of their own self-ignorance. This is why we have things spreading like creationism, anti-GMO activity, climate change debate, etc. If it were that easy, these things wouldn't exist. You can lead a horse to water....
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Health care? We're talking about the beef industry and Ayn Rand. You need to realign your dissention targeting sensors.
Re:But.. (Score:5, Funny)
The ghost of Ayn Rand should find her own existence disturbing, since ghosts are supernatural.
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Are you honestly disparaging both the tragedy of the commons and the invisible hand (i.e., a Free Market, i.e., capitalism, i.e., private owernship of resources) in the same sentence?
O, Slashdot comments... how you are a microcosm for what's wrong with this world...
Re:But.. (Score:4, Insightful)
In this case the "commons" are literally our own bodies and the ecosystems they interact with. Are you suggesting some sort of absurd enclosure movement for air so that bacterial genes can't spread from one place to another? Or are you being an absurd believer in a system for no other reason than your outward facing political philosophy depends on it?
Re:But.. (Score:5, Insightful)
I interpret it literally because there are fundamental scientific principles at work here, like convection, and the carbon cycle, which humans have not demonstrated any capacity to overcome in any sort of pragmatic sense.
Your attitude treats the market like a magic wand that you wave and *poof* no more serious real-world problems.
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If, as you say, it's good for each individual, then it must—by definition—be good for the group.
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No.
If what is good for me is to kill you and take your stuff, that is bad for you and the group. Each individual acts for his own best, he might not get that. Like when I kill you and take your stuff, before you take mine.
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No. That is not what was being discussed.
We were discussing what's good for each individual. As you point out, being murdered is clearly not good for one of the individuals, namely me; ergo, your example is pointless.
Also, as an aside: As someone else pointed out, there's no indication that killing an individual is necessarily bad for the group.
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Nope. I am being very careful with language.
I was responding to: "Even if the depletion of that resource is bad for the group it is good for each individual doing it."
The idea is that individual self-interest will lead to a tragedy of the commons. However, a tragedy of the commons is in no way in the interests of any individual! Individual self-interest will, thus, correct for it.
As the OP said: "A tragedy of the commons generally arises from individual power and freedoms." Well, ownership is a restriction
Re:But.. (Score:5, Insightful)
However, a tragedy of the commons is in no way in the interests of any individual!
This statement is absurdly false. If this were true, there would be no tragedy of the commons to talk about because everyone would be on the look out for such situations.
The tragedy of the commons happens because somebody does benefit from screwing everyone else over. In this particular case, if the beef industry was at all concerned with the tragedy of the commons, they would have abandoned antibiotic over-application years ago when resistant bacteria were first discovered.
The free market fails because some things simply are necessarily shared -- the air we breathe for example. By your "free" market, you're perfectly free to pollute the air above your land as much as you want. But unless you've figured out how to control the wind, that polluted air is going to affect all of your neighbors.
You, being the awesome capitalist that you are, see no reason to spend money installing air filters because what do you care? If you don't like the pollution yourself you just go ahead and use the money you saved on air filtering to buy a nice house a few miles away where it doesn't affect your personally.
So now we're in a situation with one of three outcomes:
- Your neighbors coerce you into installing air filters against your will.
- Your neighbors have to install their own air filters (essentially being coerced by your lack of care, to use your terminology.)
- Your neighbors just have to live with it (essentially being coerced to breathe bad air by your lack of care.)
In all of those cases, some form of market-breaking coercion is in effect. And its unavoidable as long as air is able to freely move across our arbitrarily defined boundaries.
Now you might say this is just an opportunity for more capitalism -- someone can just start producing air filters and make a fortune! This is true but it doesn't negate the fact that we're buying those air filters due to an initial breakdown in the market caused by you damaging an unavoidably shared resource.
And that's an example with fairly immediate and obvious impacts. Something like the antibiotic resistance is neither immediate nor obvious, so you don't even have to be a complete jerk to screw up the free market -- you can manage to do so completely unintentionally.
The free market works great under perfect conditions with a complete lack of externalities and a complete lack of barriers to entry. Unfortunately the real world doesn't have such conditions. The free market can still work well in the real world but some control must be influenced in order to prevent destroying public resources, prevent unnatural monopolies, keep natural monopolies in check and so forth. As usual, its very debatable exactly how much control is necessary for these purposes but it should be fairly obvious that the answer is neither "none" nor "total" but somewhere in between.
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Because the group would prefer I was not murdering their friends and family. They might also prefer they not be my next victim.
Re:But.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Horseshit. Complete and utter horseshit.
Individuals do not necessarily exhibit fully rational behavior (in fact quite seldom do), and individuals will always try to get 'more better' for themselves -- because people are irrational selfish bastards.
So, if I decide that what is better for me is to take away what you have, that isn't better (or even good) for the group if we depend on one another. Very often, what's good for an individual is detrimental to the group if the individual is utterly selfish or shortsighted -- like eating all of the food now and leaving none for later. Taking fresh water, bottling it and selling it isn't good for anybody except the ones selling it -- and once it's all gone, we're all fucked. But, for the short term, it was beneficial for some individuals to do what is best for them, and the group suffers.
The prisoners dilemma [wikipedia.org] demonstrates that if everyone does what is strictly in their own best interests, everybody loses.
Capitalism just tries to take the things which are shared resources, and make sure someone gets to it first and claims ownership of it. And when we're talking about our environment and ecosystem, it impacts all of us. And in the end you get the selfish decisions of a few impacting everybody else.
People like to pretend that 'the market' will solve these problems, when in fact it's mostly a race to the bottom where every sociopath around grabs as much as he can, to the detriment of those around him.
Re:But.. (Score:4, Insightful)
A resource can't be shared if no one claims ownership of it. So is your solution that no one is allowed to claim ownership? Or is it that the State will claim ownership?
In a system where property is not allowed, what is the motivation to be productive? An interest in the common good? That demands altruism. Without individual moral principles, the common good fails... and look, here is the tragedy of the commons again.
I guess what we've discovered here is that both capitalism and a demand economy fail when people are immoral.
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Right, something must be owned to be shared. That makes total sense -- we all share the atmosphere and the oceans, and you suggesting someone needed to own it for us to share it? Sorry, but we were sharing it before someone claimed ownership. The ownership came later and is, in fact, independent of how much we share it.
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Individuals do not necessarily exhibit fully rational behavior
To an individual, his own behavior is always rational. The concept of "rational behavior" is relativistic, making your absolutist claims absurd.
So, if I decide that what is better for me is to take away what you have
Firstly, that's not capitalism (as explained below), and secondly, that is not even what was being discussed. We were discussing what's good for each individual. As you point out, having resources forcibly taken is not good for one of the individuals, namely me; ergo, your example is pointless.
and once it's all gone, we're all fucked.
Clearly people will act out of self-interest to avoid that.
Capitalism just tries to take the things which are shared resources, and make sure someone gets to it first and claims ownership of it.
No, it's not.
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The prisoner's dilemma is one specific set of circumstances. If you tweak the numbers in the grid, everyone acting in their own best interests results in everyone winning. In fact, for most situations this is true (which is why capitalism tends to work so well), and the prisoner's dilemma is the minority case.
So most of the time capitalism works. Some of the time it doesn't. The pri
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But, as you point out, it's not good for each individual to cause a tragedy of the commons. Hence regulation, the best form of which is capitalism [slashdot.org] (by which I mean the Free Market, by which I mean a market free of coercion).
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That is, almost verbatim, exactly the fallacy that The Tragedy of the Commons was written to disprove.
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See here. [slashdot.org]
I'm saying the tragedy of the commons is not good for each individual.
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A tragedy of the commons generally arises from individual power and freedoms.
Private ownership is a restriction of such individual power and freedoms; the question, then, is how to define private ownership. Capitalism is private ownership defined through voluntary interaction.
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The 'invisible hand' concept isn't so much about the private ownership of resources, it's about the self-correcting property of markets. If there is a demand for widgets, the price goes up, causing more people to invest in their manufacture, bringing the price back down. All without any central management, just emergent behavior. Private ownership helps, but it isn't essential.
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Sure, but when the widget maker decides the widget waste is cheaper to dump in the river than a proper way, the market does not correct this since the widget maker can afford PR and filter for his water.
Re:But.. (Score:5, Funny)
That's called 'externalising the costs,' or 'the invisible middle finger.'
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Au contraire. The permanent incurable deadly disease IS the SOLUTION to the common human virus that plagues the planet. You don't know the "invisible hand" very well, do you?
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You're missing one critical detail. The invisible hand is in the position of having only the middle finger raised.
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Amusing over-extension of the metaphor, but the original intention of the description was that of pulling/pushing people, so I prefer to liken it to being shoved right off a cliff.
Re:But.. (Score:4, Interesting)
First: it's not a free market. Not in the US, anyways. The FDA and CDC and whatnot regulate what antibiotics can be used in animals... or, at least, in food animals (which is where most animal antibiotics are used). Secondly, the antibiotics used (and therefore the resistances generated) are different in animals than in humans, in large part for exactly that reason: we don't want the widespread usage of antibiotics in animals to result in human diseases becoming much more resistant. And finally: permanent and incurable is incredibly unlikely. Antibiotics resistance has an energy cost associated with it: it takes more effort to be antibiotic resistant than not. That means, absent the use of antibiotics, the resistance will naturally be selected against and fade from the population over time. And even then, there are many classes of antibiotics. Resistances are only to one or two of those classes (although a bacteria resistant to all of them is truly terrifying, it requires even higher energy cost for the bacteria).
Antibiotics resistance is a major problem on multiple levels, but the problem of resistant strains in humans is due to usage of antibiotics in humans (you know, to save people's lives), not the usage in animals. Resistant animal diseases is also a major issue, of course, because they're a huge part of our food supply, but not so much because we're worried about human diseases becoming resistant to human antibiotics because of antibiotics usage in animals.
Re:But.. (Score:4, Informative)
it takes more effort to be antibiotic resistant than not. That means, absent the use of antibiotics, the resistance will naturally be selected against and fade from the population over time.
Actually, this (often) isn't the case.
It's obvious in theory that antibiotic resistance may or may not have a cost associated - but without any selection pressure, whether the resistance evolves is down to luck. Add the antibiotic and the selection is driven but remove the antibiotic again and the selection pressure doesn't need to be back towards the original state.
What is perhaps more surprising is that reversion to antibiotic susceptibility in the absence of the antibiotic is relatively rare - what actually tends to happen is that there are other mutations driven by the absence of the antibiotic rather than loss of the resistance.
http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2148/13/163 [biomedcentral.com]
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/evo.12158/abstract [wiley.com]
http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7007/11/14 [biomedcentral.com]
The third one is interesting in that it says that sometimes antibiotic resistance can evolve due to a selection pressure unrelated to the antibiotic. If antibiotic resistance was very costly then you wouldn't expect to see this.
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The last company I worked at developed a new antimicrobial that was highly effective, but the regulatory barriers to market entry are so high, they have only made headway in using it to prevent tooth decay. Large companies might show i
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Oh, yes, please point me at the regulations that tell farmers to use non-therapeutic doses of antibiotics on their animals to make them grow a little bigger. Please. Absolutely, do it. I'll recant my position in 10 milliseconds flat.
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But cows can't eat corn, so they get ulcers, which end up killing them.
But cows that die of ulcers are worth less than slaughtered cows, so we feed them theraputic doses of antibiotics to keep them alive.
Unfortunately, the "benefits" of corn-based feed are not "little". They're huge. That's why grass-fed beef is considerably more expensive than "normal" beef. Economically, there's no way you
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And what do any of those do to promote the particular situation with anti-biotics. That's a flimsy excuse that doesn't hold any water.
Re:But.. (Score:5, Insightful)
I wasn't suggesting totalitarianism as an alternative. I don't know what might lead you to think that.
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I wasn't suggesting totalitarianism as an alternative. I don't know what might lead you to think that.
Either false dichotomies were on sale today, or somebody forced him to buy one.
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The problem we face now is that there are a sizeable number of people in the US who are so absolutely devoted to market principles, they are blind to those weaknesses - and see any effort to address them as an invitation to a communist takeover.
Re:But.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Right up until capitalism leads to its own form or totalitarianism, as corporations and cartels control pretty much everything and we all become serfs again.
Capitalism claims to be benign and benevolent, but since everyone tries to gain an unfair advantage and cheat the system, it just leads to a different form of losing your freedoms. The notion that it will self correct assumes that people are honest and not inherently out to screw everyone over -- which is completely disconnected from reality.
Left to its own devices, capitalism will subject you to the same atrocities, it will just defend them on a different set of principles.
Some people have mythologized capitalism and the free market to the point of it being a religion -- it is uncritically championed as being perfect and infallible, and completely ignores many aspects of human behavior which negate some of its assumptions. And once you are convinced that you are the keeper of Immutable Truth and Knowledge, you will defend that belief to the exclusion of evidence to the contrary.
Re:But.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Capitalism doesn't claim to be benign or benevolent. It just claims to be better at finding more efficient solutions than systems which are (over)managed.
The key to making capitalism work though is competition. The more eyeballs you have looking at a problem and trying to solve it, the more quickly you can arrive at an optimal solution (vs. a single set of eyeballs in the managed solution). Evolution is capitalism. The totalitarianism and serfdom you complain about is the antithesis of capitalism. If you corrupt the system so all parties can no longer compete freely, by definition it's no longer pure capitalism.
The one area where capitalism does fail is in externalized costs. Where one actor gains the benefits of their decision while the other actor is stuck with the costs. Pollution and overfishing are primary examples of this. The technical nomenclature is the prisoner's dilemma (one actor shifts the costs of their decision onto another actor) and the tragedy of the commons (one actor divides the cost among all actors). So it's not a case of capitalism being a panacea or a complete failure. In these types of situations, capitalism fails and you need management. Outside of these situations, it's the most efficient solution (that we've been able to find) and management is usually just an opportunity to introduce corruption. Both sides of this debate are right, we just need to clarify the situations when one side is right and when the other side is right.
Re:But.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:But.. (Score:5, Insightful)
1. The market cannot regulate itself (the government is what regulates it and enforces contracts and legitimizes the money exchange)
2. Adam Smith's free market book talks about how competitive markets lower prices for consumers.
Monsanto does NOT want to be competitive. They say people won't buy GMO-labeled food when what they mean is people won't buy GMO-labeled food at the same price as already-familiar food. If Monsanto is forced to label it, they are also forced to pass the cost savings on to consumers in exactly the way Adam Smith--the god of free market enterprise--postulated.
Like most, they want all the benefits of the market without having to follow the rules that actually keep the market working for society as a whole.
Re:But.. (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is that the free market model doesn't take non-local effects into account. (Or "Not my problem")
Essentially it doesn't prevent someone from causing damage to someone else for profit.
If there had been any connection, that is you can make huge profits by causing a little damage to someone else, this wouldn't be a big problem, then it would be possible to compensate those who got hurt.
Sadly the free market model leads to a situation where someone will cause much damage on a global level for a very tiny profit.
The regulated version is a form of socialism where the government limits and punishes those who tries to make a profit on the behalf of others.
The non-regulated version is an anarchy where the government doesn't step in and protect those who makes a profit when the those who were hurt by it wants to hang them.
The people who talks about "less regulation" seldom wants the second alternative, rather they strive for a system that is called fascism where the government steps in and protects specific individuals so that they can abuse others.
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That's not what anti-biotic treatments of farm animals do. So... all the reasoning the follows that premise is wrong.
Duh (Score:5, Insightful)
If you use something that kills of the weak members of a given entity over a period of time the result will be the surviving members will become strong. Darwinism is brutal and efficient like that whether you want it to be or not. In this case by over using antibiotics everywhere from handsoap to feed for cows we have resulted in the saturation of the environment. The result was inevitable and it really is a case of we did this to ourselves.
If memory serves Norway prohibits their use in all settings but hospitals and has healthier citizens as a result. It really does boil down to the classic George Carlin germs are good comedy bit. We need regular exposure to germs to become stronger and build healthier immune systems. The only thing were building is stronger and healthier bugs and weaker humans - there's something wrong with that.
Re:Duh (Score:5, Interesting)
I wasn't a terribly "clean" kid; I didn't shower often at all and didn't wash my hands unless I was about to cook food. I still refuse to use hand sanitizer or anti-germ wipes and I don't expect every surface I touch to be disinfected. Some of that has changed as I have gotten older (I shower at least once a day and by most peoples' standards I'm quite "clean"), but I'm willing to bet that my "unclean" behaviors in the past and my lack of fear of germs and dirt and grease under the nails explain why I very rarely get sick (once a year maybe) and even more rarely stay sick longer than a few days.
I read somewhere that there's a theory about auto-immune diseases being a result of humans no longer having parasites and infections. The theory was that the immune system has nothing to do and "gets bored." The possible solution is introducing a limited amount of relatively benign parasites. I don't feel like searching for it right now, but I found it to be a fascinating theory.
As an added bonus, I can kill germ-o-phobes by breathing at them and there will be no evidence linking it back to me. I'M A FUCKING VIKING.
Re:Duh (Score:5, Informative)
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There are other obvious differences too though, like diet. You literally are what you eat. High sugar intake weakens your immune system, and is inflammatory. Artificial preservatives kill bacteria in your gut, furthering the lack of "good bacteria" that we hear about. Reading about this over-use of anti-biotics in livestock is making me seriously consider becoming a vegetarian :/ I hope it doesn't end up in milk and cheese.. though it probably does..
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High sugar intake weakens your immune system, and is inflammatory.
Citation required. For both claims.
Artificial preservatives kill bacteria in your gut.
citation required. Including that these preservatives make it past your stomach. Given that most of the food i have still goes off, clearly its less preserving than your assertion.
Reading about this over-use of anti-biotics in livestock is making me seriously consider becoming a vegetarian :/ I hope it doesn't end up in milk and cheese.. though it probably does..
In many countries that allow this (NZ does not for example), it can't be livestock that is milked and if its to be slaughtered its need to have a antibiotic free period. Yes the meat/milk is often tested, at least in NZ. It does make it into the milk, as a dairy farmer in NZ if you need to admini
Re:Duh (Score:4, Interesting)
High sugar intake weakens your immune system, and is inflammatory.
Citation required. For both claims.
Maybe for the first one, but if you read even a little into how your diet affects the body then you should know that sugar is inflammatory.. but here you go
Effect of various carbohydrates on immune system [nutrition.org]. This shows that ingesting sugar weakens your immune system, and that fasting actually boosts it (which may be a reason that we sometimes lose our appetite when we're sick).
Sugar and inflammation [nutrition.org]. Though if you wanted, you could just try it yourself. Increasing your sugar intake also causes your body to retain more water and salt.
Given that most of the food i have still goes off, clearly its less preserving than your assertion.
Does most of the food that you have also contain artificial preservatives? I doubt it. I have to avoid sulphites. They're found in pretty much all wine, some beers (anything German is usually fine thanks to the Reinheitsgebot), cider, dried fruits, glucose syrup, any processed corn ingredient (maize starch, corn flour, HFCS, etc), and more..
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Yes of course, if she's been eating it. She literally will have some parts of her body that are made from your semen. I don't see what's so confusing that you have to ask about it.
We live in interesting times (Score:2)
We live in interesting times, and it seems they are likely to get more interesting as time goes by. What was the Chinese curse again?
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May you live in interesting times.
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1. May you live in interesting times.
2. May you be recognized by people in high places.
3. May you get what you wish for.
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Ok, it's an American curse. A curse is a curse, just like the genuine American fortune cookies they sell in East Asia are nonetheless fortune cookies.
Mean two different things... (Score:4, Interesting)
genes that make the crows resistant to antibiotics
bacteria in the crows were resistant to several other antibiotics
I presume that the bacteria in the crows are resistant, not the crows themselves.
If so, then we're in for a Hell of a time finding a cure when we're hit with a devastating bacteriological pandemic.
However, if the crows were resistant (I doubt that's what the article means) then that would be a cool idea, because it would mean that bacteria could act as a DNA conduit between species.
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Of course you are correct, original source article was entitled "American crows as carriers of vancomycin-resistant enterococci with vanA gene"
Re:Mean two different things... (Score:4, Funny)
I had the same thought. When was the last time someone had to fight off a crow infection?
1963 [imdb.com]
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I wouldn't worry until they spread to blackbirds, if four and twenty of them can be baked in a pie, one just might get into an artery somewhere.
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You can bake anything you wish into pie. You just need to make it big enough.
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Oh, you laugh now, but we will come.
Re:Mean two different things... (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, they've found that Bacteria and other organisms in your body do communicate through geene expression. So yes, Bacteria can change an animal in such a way that the animals own body informs future bacteria how to deal with antibacterial drugs.
Secondly, the devastating bacteriological pandemic is already here. Hospitals around the world are now opperating under the assumption that they now have permanent, incurable Gram Negative bacterial infections throughout their hospitals. Most hospitals wont even release data on the subject. They're finding drug resistant bacteria in the drinking water wells in India. This Genie is already out of the bottle.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gram-negative_bacteria [wikipedia.org]
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TL;DR (Score:2)
But is there any indication that these resistance genes weren't already in those populations beforehand? Is there actually some reason to think that the resistance genes have crossed from bacteria to all those higher-order lifeforms listed? What does it even mean for a crow to be antibiotic resistant?
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It's called Quorum Sensing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quorum_sensing [wikipedia.org]
Until recently they thought Quorum Sensing was simple gene communication between individuals in a bacterial colony to co-ordinate behavior. Recently however they've found evidence that the bacteria can modify the genes in cells of the host and communicate even after the current infection may be cured. Not only that but they think these changes may even be passed from parent to child. They quite literally make the entire animal gene resist
PBS Frontline "Hunting the Nightmare Bacteria" (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/hunting-the-nightmare-bacteria/ [pbs.org]
Scariest thing I've watched in a long time.
SimCity? (Score:2)
NO need to worry (Score:2)
Relax. I'm pretty sure nobody here is a crow, gull, housefly, moth, fox, frog, shark or whale.
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I doubt I'm the only furry on slashdot.
Exciting? (Score:2)
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Very poorly written article... (Score:5, Interesting)
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The article makes it sound as if the crows are themselves acquiring genetic modifications giving them resistance to antibiotic compounds. However, it is the bacteria inhabiting the crows intestine that have acquired the antibiotic resistance genes, not the crows themselves.
There's only one solution: stone the crows!
Humans will evolve too (Score:2)
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Viruses don't need antibiotic resistance.
HIV is bloody good at developing antiviral resistance though. It adapts so fast that individual patients need to swap drugs after a few years. That's all the time the virus needs to adapt.
You fail at biology. (Score:2)
Humans MAY develop resistance or immunity.
MAYBE. It's never a guarantee.
And if the agent is particularly virulent, well, that's great. We just kill off a majority of the population so a small number of people who won the genetic lottery can spend the rest of their lives walking the earth trying to find someone to breed with.
There are already classes of pathogen out there that are resistant. MRSA (Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus), and VRE (Vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus).
And yes, to a healt
stop evolution (Score:2)
If antibiotic resistance is spreading amongst 'wild' pathogens, perhaps Roundup-resistance will start spreading amongst weeds.
Who'da thunk?
Let's pass a law against evolution. Monsanto will surely be onboard with that.
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I thought Texas and most of the southern US already passed a law against evolution...
Exciting? Maybe. But not in a good way. (Score:2)
Usually "exciting" is used as a positive recommendation. That's not the case here.
Something like this is BAD. REALLY bad.
There are whole classes of pathogens that are kept under control via antibiotic therapy now.
If they suddenly develop resistance, we're in DEEP shit.
Yes, like a Hollywood script (Score:2)
If a Hollywood movie showed us a cataclysmic event in which millions of people died, I would call that "exciting".
If the same events occurred in real life, I'm not sure that's the word I would use.
Farm Vets push AntiBiotics (Score:3)
The livestock industry uses them, IIRC, to aid in the fattening of the cows, pigs, etc; Apparently some farmers have discovered other ways to raise healthy and "fat" livestock WITHOUT the use of AntiBiotics, however it is still an uphill battle convincing many farmers to leave that tried and true, ancient tradition of pumping cows full of AntiBiotics.
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Politicians and lobbyists should all be rounded up and imprisoned.
Fixed.
Re:Dystopia (Score:5, Insightful)
They even took steps to limit that much. The terminator seed technology was partly intended to prevent contamination [wikipedia.org]: if the plants can't breed, they're less likely to mix with wild species and contaminate them. Obviously they had a lot of financial interest in it, both because if resistance gets into the pest populations, that's going to make their product worthless. And in response to the controversy and accusations that it would screw over farmers, Monsanto never actually put terminator seeds on the market. [monsanto.com]
Anyway, pointing fingers is only so helpful, even at the agricultural entities that ARE driving antibiotic resistance. At this point, we know the looming disaster. It's not rocket science or even climate science either. This is high school biology. Businesses can be expected to faithfully act without any regard other than immediate profit. Ignorant patients will always find greedy doctors willing to give them antibiotics they don't need for diseases that aren't bacterial. Fixing the problem won't happen voulontarily. We need legislation to prevent milk from cows treated with antibiotics from being sold in supermarkets cheaper than untreated milk. Same with other livestock. It's an externalized cost: there's an advantage to it that needs to be taken away. We also need to strip the medical licenses of doctors who give out antibiotics for the cold. Either they're shockingly ignorant of the last 20 years of research and aren't fit to be doctors, or they're intentionally contributing to a real health hazard and should face criminal charges.
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Ignorant patients will always find greedy doctors willing to give them antibiotics they don't need for diseases that aren't bacterial.
Why aren't doctors allowed to give people sugar pills instead of antibiotics? Of if they are allowed, why aren't they actively doing it instead of sending people home empty handed (which leaves them unhappy so they go looking for a 'better' doctor)?
There should be organization at a national level to produce nicely packaged placebos in important looking boxes. They could even change the name every few months so people don't figure it out.
If there's anything that's in world/national interest, this is it.
Re:Dystopia (Score:4, Insightful)
Some do (Score:5, Interesting)
Why aren't doctors allowed to give people sugar pills instead of antibiotics? Of if they are allowed, why aren't they actively doing it...
Some do. My dad used to do this with obstreperous patients who would not take no for an answer when antibiotics and their ineffectiveness on viruses were explained to them. He was honest though. He did not call them antibiotics but rather he would prescribe a regular dose multi-vitamin with a fancy sounding name and tell them that this was the best treatment for them given their condition (usually just a bad cold).
The patients were not exactly happy with not getting an antibiotic but at the same time at least felt they were getting something to treat their condition. On the flip side my dada felt that he has not lied to the patient and, given that they had a virus, he was still giving them the best treatment option both for themselves and humanity at large. However my dad was a doctor years ago (and is now beyond the reach of any human courts!) and in this increasingly litigious world I can well imagine that doctors think twice about doing this. Even if it is in everyone's best interests they don't want to be dragged into some long lasting, expensive court battle just to prove it which is likely what would happen if a patient ever found out they had been prescribed simple vitamins.
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Wow thats great. I, unfortunately, grew up with a pediatrician who was gung-ho about antibiotics and prescribed them for me many times. My mother still defends the practice saying that the Doctors reasoning was that it would prevent opportunistic bacterial infections while the virus was running its course.
Only recently, after 20 years of it coming up, has my mother admitted that maybe it didn't actually help...especially since we eventually identified that I wasn't getting repeated infections causing my ton
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sending people home empty handed (which leaves them unhappy so they go looking for a 'better' doctor)?
For that part, the word 'better doctor' is very subjective to the patient. Many patients look for 'magic pills' that immediately relieve their symptoms. How many people do you know that take pain relief pills whenever they have a headache rather than attempt to relax and rest first? Of course, there could be serious cases involved, but I doubt that is the majority. Therefore 'unhappy' does not imply 'find a better doctor' because the 'better' could become 'worse' under circumstances (including short or long
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Why aren't doctors allowed to give people sugar pills instead of antibiotics?
In many Asian countries, that is what they do. Except instead of sugar, they use herbs. They get all the benefit of the placebo effect [wikipedia.org], but none of the drawbacks of antibiotic resistance.
Re:Dystopia (Score:4, Insightful)
It's called homeopathy, and they didn't need to change the name in centuries.
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Wrong agriculture business. This is antibiotic resistance.
Not completely wrong. Monsanto does make some antibiotics for agricultural use. For instance, they make LS-50, a mixture of lincomycin and spectinomycin, which is used on chickens. LS-50 is also occasionally used, illegally, by dairy farmers.
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It's "exciting" in the same sense that having bullets wizzing past you is "exciting".