Antimicrobial Resistance Now a Leading Cause of Death Worldwide, Study Finds (theguardian.com) 101
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Antimicrobial resistance poses a significant threat to humanity, health leaders have warned, as a study reveals it has become a leading cause of death worldwide and is killing about 3,500 people every day. More than 1.2 million -- and potentially millions more -- died in 2019 as a direct result of antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections, according to the most comprehensive estimate to date of the global impact of antimicrobial resistance (AMR). The stark analysis covering more than 200 countries and territories was published in the Lancet. It says AMR is killing more people than HIV/Aids or malaria. Many hundreds of thousands of deaths are occurring due to common, previously treatable infections, the study says, because bacteria that cause them have become resistant to treatment.
The new Global Research on Antimicrobial Resistance (Gram) report estimates deaths linked to 23 pathogens and 88 pathogen-drug combinations across 204 countries and territories in 2019. Statistical modeling was used to produce estimates of the impact of AMR in all locations -- including those with no data -- using more than 470m individual records obtained from systematic literature reviews, hospital systems, surveillance systems, and other data sources. The analysis shows AMR was directly responsible for an estimated 1.27 million deaths worldwide, and associated with an estimated 4.95 million deaths, in 2019. HIV/Aids and malaria have been estimated to have caused 860,000 and 640,000 deaths, respectively, in 2019. While AMR poses a threat to people of all ages, young children were found to be at particularly high risk, with one in five deaths attributable to AMR occurring in children under the age of five. Some of the actions policymakers can take, as mentioned in the report, include "optimizing the use of existing antibiotics, taking greater action to monitor and control infections, and providing more funding to develop new antibiotics and treatments."
The new Global Research on Antimicrobial Resistance (Gram) report estimates deaths linked to 23 pathogens and 88 pathogen-drug combinations across 204 countries and territories in 2019. Statistical modeling was used to produce estimates of the impact of AMR in all locations -- including those with no data -- using more than 470m individual records obtained from systematic literature reviews, hospital systems, surveillance systems, and other data sources. The analysis shows AMR was directly responsible for an estimated 1.27 million deaths worldwide, and associated with an estimated 4.95 million deaths, in 2019. HIV/Aids and malaria have been estimated to have caused 860,000 and 640,000 deaths, respectively, in 2019. While AMR poses a threat to people of all ages, young children were found to be at particularly high risk, with one in five deaths attributable to AMR occurring in children under the age of five. Some of the actions policymakers can take, as mentioned in the report, include "optimizing the use of existing antibiotics, taking greater action to monitor and control infections, and providing more funding to develop new antibiotics and treatments."
Research into new antibiotics (Score:5, Insightful)
Antibiotics seem to be not very profitable for pharma companies, it costs a lot to research and people use it for just a few days when needed, most pharma money is directed to long use medicines (like for heart problems) or ones that you can really gouge prices (cancer).
Governments around the world should heavily invest in new antibiotics patent free or with cheap patents because, as the article mentions, this is a leading cause of death and consequently high cost for the health system, and the antibiotics that we have are being rendered unusable by irresponsible people which prescribe antibiotics for virus infections or people that insist to not take the pills to the end and end up just selecting resistance and require even more potent ones.
Also we need to invest in different techniques, such as fages, which shows quite a lot of promise in this area.
Re:Research into new antibiotics (Score:5, Insightful)
Agriculture is ready to use kilotons of any new last line anti-biotic, just need to tweak the composition a tiny bit so you can pretend it's not the human use one.
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Do a few searches on chicken, and astonishingly beef too, if you're wanting a good scare. Eat less chicken, handle it well, wash your hands and cook it thoroughly. Buy your beef from a local locker that will dry age it.
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That implies that you find widespread shit-staining (let's not mince words) on beef for human consumption, surprising. What reason would you have for even starting to think that? Cattle have guts, which are full of all sorts of bacteria - actually more bacteria absolutely, and probably more variety, than chicken, because their digestive system depends on mass microbial processing of plant cellulose. But, they have guts ; so at some point in the butchering p
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I think Adam Smith (who also probably never worked on a meat-line) promoted this concept of "separating actions" on a production line.
Or do you actually think that the meat you eat is produced by hunters, individually hunting down and kiling those cows (sheep, chickens, turkeys, llamas)?
I don't know your history, but I do know how ven
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I have worked in a butchering plant, not as a line worker. You couldn't pay me enough to take those kind of risks, trying to push those lines that hard. There's a whole lot of accidents, and I'm amazed it isn't more. Thankfully is was relatively clean beef
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Not really informative though is it? New antibiotics tend to be expensive, and in countries where the food standards are halfway competent
I.E. not America.
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The biggest reason for antimicrobial resistance is a) people using any antibiotic they can get their hands on regardless if they need it or not, and b) people not using the entire dose as prescribed. Instead of following the 7 day regimen of use, after three or four days they stop using
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I've seen *a* study that claims that "b) people not using the entire dose as prescribed." isn't a real problem. The problem is more long term uses.
Well, that was just one study. It might be wrong. But I'd be a bit hesitant about assuming that it is just because your doctor told you that when you were a kid. It *may* be correct (either way).
OTOH, I do always finish my antibiotics. It's quite unlikely to hurt, and it may be beneficial.
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If we don't change our behavior, The Antibiotics game will be a constant warfare, with the Bacteria evolving into something that can handle the new antibiotic, at a rate faster than the antibiotic can be used in a wide scale.
Lets think of this in a macro scale.
You found out that you have an enemy.
So you get a gun to protect yourself.
You enemy sees that you have a gun, so you are considered a risk to them, so they get a gun too, probably a better one than you. Because to them you are now seen as a real thre
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If we don't change our behavior, The Antibiotics game will be a constant warfare, with the Bacteria evolving into something that can handle the new antibiotic, at a rate faster than the antibiotic can be used in a wide scale.
Lets think of this in a macro scale. You found out that you have an enemy. So you get a gun to protect yourself. You enemy sees that you have a gun, so you are considered a risk to them, so they get a gun too, probably a better one than you. Because to them you are now seen as a real threat vs just some guy they didn't like. You see that your enemy too is armed and in a better position to attack you then him, so you get an other gun....
During this process neither you or your enemy are feeling any safer and are actually less safe as this progresses, because as each person become more fearful chances are one or the other will actually do harm.
The analogy is good, but the actors are wrong. In this story, both "you" and "your enemy" are actually bacteria trying to out-compete one another. Antibiotics are discovered, not developed. Sure, companies may tweak them to be easier on humans, to be less aggressive at destroying certain helpful bacteria, to get through the digestive system with less loss, etc., but the initial form is typically discovered in nature. Barring one bacterium taking over the world, we can probably assume that new antibiotic
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A safe bet, round here.
Personally, I always dismount the robotic machine gun turret from my laptop, unload, and breech-lock it before logging on to Slashdot. You never know when there's some dangerous American hacker who's going to hijack it and shoot me through the screen. I'd unload your grenade launcher too, unless you're really confident that your malware checker is good for that too.
What - no machine gun and grenade launcher? What sort of heathen un-American prevret are
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Don't worry, if you do change your behaviour - however you change it - the "game" will also be constant warfare.
It's biology - constant warfare, and "De'il tak' the hindmost". One day it will kill you. But you can have some influence on the probability that tomorrow is the day it succeeds in killing you.
No. It's not the people. It's the PROFIT! (Score:5, Informative)
If there is ONE thing that the current pandemic should have branded onto our brains it's that we should get VERY suspicious the moment someone mentions "personal responsibility" as either a cause or a solution to a global problem.
Cause just like with global warming, environmental pollution, systemic poverty, obesity epidemic, US school shootings, US opioid epidemic (Remember that one? Now at +100k deaths annually. [cdc.gov] Don't forget to eat your fries with your ice cream. [yahoo.com])...
It's not about one person's personal responsibility.
It's about systemic and systematic exploitation of people, environment, political system... STRICTLY FOR PROFIT, by the entities which exist solely for profit - the corporations.
It's not personal responsibility. It's corporate greed.
a) people using any antibiotic they can get their hands on regardless if they need it or not, and b) people not using the entire dose as prescribed.
70-80% of all antibiotics in the US [iccr.org] are used in farming of meat.
THAT is where the antimicrobial resistance is coming from. [ft.com]
But the best part is that animals are NOT being fed antibiotics because they are sick.
Animals are fed antibiotics [nih.gov] because it makes them grow bigger, faster [paho.org] - creating profits for both the meat AND the pharmaceutical industry.
The area where concern exists particularly is the use of antibiotics in animals as "feed additives", "growth promoters" or "digestive enhancers", the variety of names possible being indicative of the full lack of understanding of how these act.
4.1 Antibiotics as Growth Promoters
As early as 1946 American workers demonstrated that streptomycin and sulphasuxidine increased the weight gain of chicks, an observation largely ignored at the time.
Later the waste products of tetracycline fermentation were shown to increase growth, a response initially attributed to vitamin B12.
The greatest effects of growth promoters occur in early life but not all antibiotics produce the same effect in different species. Thus penicillin will promote growth in pigs and poultry, but not calves, whereas tetracyclines increase growth in all these species.
The growth promoters (digestion enhancers) in common use include; Carbodox, Olaquindox, Avilamycin, Avoparin, Efrotomycin, Flavophospholipol, Oleandamycin, Spiramycin, Tylosin and Virginiamycin.
There is still doubt as to precisely how growth promoters exert their action. They are used at low concentrations (2.5 ppm to 50 ppm according to compound) and increase average daily growth and food conversion ratios by 3% to 11% percent.
Three commonly accepted explanations are that the sub-therapeutic doses of antibiotic also suppress disease, another explanation is the maintenance of a more effective and absorption gut lining and a further one is the suppression of commensal bacteria which would divert nutrients from the host to microbe.
Other explanations offered are a decrease in bacterial growth depressing toxins including ammonia or monoamines, increased synthesis of vitamins and the growth factors reduced intestinal mucosal epithelial cell turnover and reduced intestinal mobility.
It is interesting to note that the effects of some antibiotics on growth are more marked under conditions of poor hygiene than when animals are kept in new accomm
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Interesting history there.... but I can't help but view it from the farmer's perspective too? EVERY business wants to run as efficiently as possible, so if you've got this option of feeding your pigs these antibiotics that ensure they grow bigger, stay healthier, and allow you to farm them more efficiently with less land usage? That's a pretty huge advancement!
It's easy to scream "Corporate greed!!" here, but this whole thing started as more of a mistake. They thought Vitamin B12 was the key to begin with.
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The problem is caused by meat farms using tons of antibiotics to improve yield. This generates resistant organisms which spill over to humans.
Just stop using antibiotics to raise meat.
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The most costly human pathogens are zoonotic. Meat production and consumptions leads to epidemics and pandemics, with or without livestock antibiotics. If this is the price you're willing to pay to eat meat, then take your damn vaccine. And be prepared to constantly develop new antibiotics to fight bacteria as well.
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Hmmm. That claim is going to need some hard numbers to support it. Unless you've come up with evidence that Helicobacter pylori is actually a zoonotic species. The last I heard [wikipedia.org], it was thought to have been around about as long as our species. Certainly longer than agriculture. It would be interesting to have microbiologically secure samples from pre-18th century Australian people, to see if they carried it. But that option probably died well before the last "pure
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Cost in either human life or economic impact. Pathogens that cause disability tend to have a very large economic impact. And while persistent I don't think H. Pylori necessarily makes a list of diseases with a high economic or quality of life cost, even in the developing world. A better example for your argument might be Mycobacterium tuberculosis
, which we think has evolved with humans over time, but it is not clear if it originated in some other mammal or possibly in earlier primates. Or even better still
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I'm betting that you never had a friend or family member in agony from a stomach ulcer, or saw Zantac sitting as the most prescribed drug in the world for a decade.
I lost a grandparent to TB, you insensitive clod. When I went to work in a TB laboratory (an entire building serving a ward of a 10 ward hospital) one summer I showed immun
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I'm not concerned about "big pharma", but were they are putting their money NOW is the concern, from what I've read there is no or little money on antibiotics.
And about the goat paste (wasn't horse mainly!?), this is medicine that has been around for ages, that these big companies will happily continue producing because they've already recouped development costs long ago and depending on how they keep tweaking the formula can milk that cash cow for decades more. My point is about the development of new ones
Public money can't bring a drug to market (Score:2)
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The government invests millions (billions) of dollars in new drug research (NIH).
Government pays for the basic research and pharma takes over promising new drugs and does all of the FDA stuff.
For instance, mRNA COVID vaccines. Basic research to develop methods and techniques were funded by government for many years. Pharma commercialized that to create the vaccines.
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endered unusable by irresponsible people which prescribe antibiotics for virus infections
I have a lot familiar relationships with medical practitioners and I asked them about this once because I see it bandied about a lot. What they told me is, it isnt really a thing. Its more yes my geriatric patient that I have just diagnosed with COVID-19 (a virus) is leaving with a script of amoxicillin among other things because my last two similar patients ended up contracting bacterial pneumonia because that is very common when you combined inflamed respiratory tissues with an otherwise stressed/weakene
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Maybe is in the place you live, unfortunately where I live is very common for medics to give people antibiotics for things they know it won't help just because people will complain they are leaving empty handed from a consultation, they prescribe almost as a placebo, which is very irresponsible of their part, but most justify as being tired and jaded, so don't care that much.
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I would rather see research and investment focused on developing bacteriophages. The antibiotics arms race is too easy to game in a for-profit system and multi-resistant bacteria strains have been seen in the wild, indicating that the mechanisms used by antibiotics are susceptible to resistance through natural selection.
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Bacteriophages are an interesting idea, but if they are ever deployed (in human healthcare) in sufficient quantities to kill even 10% of damaging pathogens (not just bacteria - parasites too ; and if you can target them onto viruses, why not them as well?) then you are just going to create a new evolutionary pressure which will force them (the target organisms) to explore biochemical (and hence, genetic) routes to evade them.
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Duh (Score:4, Informative)
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As a parent, I'm curious about life before antibiotics. Did everyone who got a sore throat die from it?
My wife takes the kids to the doctor every time they have a sore throat or a runny nose, and they walk out with a fist full of antibiotics. I figure if we were in the 1800's, my whole family would be dead from sore throats by now. Thank God for medicine.
Re: Duh (Score:2)
Re:Duh (Score:5, Insightful)
As a parent, I'm curious about life before antibiotics. Did everyone who got a sore throat die from it?
My wife takes the kids to the doctor every time they have a sore throat or a runny nose, and they walk out with a fist full of antibiotics. I figure if we were in the 1800's, my whole family would be dead from sore throats by now. Thank God for medicine.
Actually, dying from common childhood diseases was quite common in the 1800s.
Now cue the survivor bias, "well my grandpappy didn't, he lived to be 90!"
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Yes, but how many of those "childhood diseases" were something that an antibiotic would help cure? Vaccines were a lot more important. However antibiotics are a great benefit when treating an infected wound. And most vaccines don't help that all that much. (A notable exception is the tetanus vaccine.)
Anti-bacterial measures often don't help much against viruses or fungi. Anti-viral measures often don't help much against bacteria or fungi. Anti-fungal measures (such as they are) often dont help much ag
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Yes, but how many of those "childhood diseases" were something that an antibiotic would help cure? ...
A metric ton of them. Hell people died of the common cold when it turned into severe bacterial bronchitis. Strep throat can be fatal if left untreated... as well as a variety of many other issues.
You could burn your thumb on the stove and die in the 1800s due to infection.
Because of: Filter error: Your comment looks too much like ascii art. I need to write some more. This is not ascii art, and this is a real comment. I'm really not sure why slashdot's system is flagging this as ascii art, this is quite
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Strep throat can be fatal if left untreated.
The old name for "strep throat" was Scarlet Fever.
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This is not ascii art, and this is a real comment. I'm really not sure why slashdot's system is flagging this as ascii art, this is quite strange.
Funny how Slashdot's "ascii art" detector doesn't recognise giant swastikas.
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Lots and lots of them. So they started just prescribing them all the time instead of doing proper diagnosis, which takes time and effort and money. And now look where we are... in serious fucking trouble due to overuse of antibiotics.
The easiest thing is rarely the best thing. And doctors, who supposedly know better, caused this problem.
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Lots and lots of them. So they started just prescribing them all the time instead of doing proper diagnosis, which takes time and effort and money. And now look where we are... in serious fucking trouble due to overuse of antibiotics.
The easiest thing is rarely the best thing. And doctors, who supposedly know better, caused this problem.
Not just lazy doctors, lazy farmers as well. Just like it is easier to carpet-bomb your fields with pesticides than it is to get the ecosystem to work with you, it's easier to pump your cattle full of antibiotics than it is to practice proper hygiene.
It's not laziness (Score:2)
Doctors do not have the time to intimately diagnose every patient. They have to apply the "if it looks like a duck" method to most people they see because, well, it probably is a duck. You want complete, thorough diagnoses, fine. But add an hour to every visit, and accept the costs of the additional testing.
Farmers aren't particularly lazy either. They work the same time as before, but with better yields. If farmers can't use those things, yields go down, prices go up. As long as everybody is on board, we'r
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You overrate the immune system. It's great, but it's far from perfect.
Also, in you list you included Zinc, which is quite iffy. The optimal level of Zinc is beneficial, but excessive Zinc is as bad as too little. And it's cumulative. And too much D will lead to bone spurs. C is pretty safe. You should get most of your K from intestinal flora, which you usually get if you eat uncooked leafy greens. (I'm not sure that iceberg lettuce counts. I like "spring mix" or "herb mix", but don't know of any stu
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We mostly agree.
Too much zinc or anything else can be harmful, especially if it's fat-soluble, but moderate supplementation shouldn't be. D, K, and zinc are believed to work together synergistically, and it's way better to get optimal levels of all three. Note that zinc and copper can interfere with one another, and ideally if you take both, you should take them separately.
The best source of vitamin D is by moderate sunlight exposure (not enough to burn because that raises melanoma risk). It is difficult
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And too much D will lead to bone spurs
Take vitamin D -- It gets you out of serving in land wars in Asia!
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Our (UK's - well, England's) Deputy Chief Medical Officer was doing a "COVID Science" presentation for kids [wikipedia.org] over the Xmas period, during which he reminded them that the life-saving of "medical science" is still dwarfed by the contributions of clean water and adequate sanitation (sewage collection and treatment) in terms of lives saved.
He may have been (literally) simplifyin
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or at least delayed - but all such claims are about delaying death, not really preventing it
All health care and sanitation is about delaying death. There is no way to "prevent" it.
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Both things are true. Prior to antibiotics, not even the 1800s try more like 1940s, many many people died from what are now easily treated common childhoold aliments.
Its also true that then as now, no your typical strep throat case did not result in death! It also isn't *likely* to actually require medical intervention today either. Chances are very very good it will resolve on its own in time. HOWEVER - It will take longer to resolve. Long lasting untreated likely more severe before they get tamped down i
Re:Duh (Score:5, Interesting)
As a parent, I'm curious about life before antibiotics. Did everyone who got a sore throat die from it?
My wife takes the kids to the doctor every time they have a sore throat or a runny nose, and they walk out with a fist full of antibiotics.
I used to get a confirmed diagnosis of strep throat every winter or two like clockwork, even having it develop into Scarlet Fever one of those times. I also developed allergies to almost everything in the penicillin family of drugs (e.g. penicillin, amoxicillin, erythromycin, and variants like z-pac, etc.) over time. Doctors have a spiel they give about sore throats that I’ve heard at least a dozen times, in which they tell you that most sore throats aren’t actually strep or anything to worry about, but I can always tell when it’s strep because it causes me far worse pain than the other causes of sore throat, and the rapid tests have always confirmed my suspicions, which frequently results in a surprised, “oh, you actually have strep” response from docs who are used to people coming in for every little thing.
A few years back I went in and they prescribed Cipro, which is fairly heavy handed, but which that doctor didn’t see a way around, given all my allergies. The next time that I went in, however, a more experienced doctor sent me home empty-handed.
Curious, I asked what drove that decision. More or less, she wanted to save Cipro for if/when I actually needed it for something significant and was concerned that she might do me harm by prompting an allergic response to Cipro if she continued prescribing it as her colleagues had in previous years. I asked about Scarlet Fever, but it turns out it really isn’t a concern once you’ve reached adulthood.
More or less, despite having a confirmed case of strep, she told me the best course of action was to take it easy and simply treat the pain if necessary. Likewise, I confirmed with her that unless additional symptoms developed or lasted beyond the usual extent, I didn’t need to come in for treatment for any future cases of strep. It was better that I simply let it run its course.
I’m firmly in the camp of “medicine is a modern miracle” and NOT the “our bodies know best” camp, so I’m not suggesting you should abandon good science or medicine because you should “trust your body”. But I do think we needlessly over-prescribe antibiotics and that there are a number of cases, such as sore throats, where we’re perhaps a bit more fearful than we should be. Listen to your doctor and ask whether you actually need to be bringing your kids in for those sniffles and sore throats. I’d wager that they’d be fine having you simply keep them at home.
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I don't see an inherent conflict between science-based medicine (which a lot of it isn't, but a lot of it is), versus "our bodies know best," which, for the most part, 99% of the time they do.
Ideally, you use science-based medicine when the body is unable to fight off infections or other illnesses on its own, although it usually can, or else we would not survive infancy.
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That's a social effect, not a medical one, and a wildly variable one. In the different but relatively "developed" world of pre-modern harems, the family size of the important developed people (the harem owner) tended towards the multiple hundreds because it suited their social conditions, even in the face of relatively poor medical condit
Re: Duh (Score:2)
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As a parent, I'm curious about life before antibiotics. Did everyone who got a sore throat die from it?
My wife takes the kids to the doctor every time they have a sore throat or a runny nose, and they walk out with a fist full of antibiotics. I figure if we were in the 1800's, my whole family would be dead from sore throats by now. Thank God for medicine.
If it was actually strep throat, yeah, untreated, in children, that frequently develops into scarlet fever, which had a mortality rate of around 25% back around 1900 in the pre-antibiotic era [wikipedia.org]. That said, if the doctor is prescribing antibiotics for runny noses, or for sore throats without confirming it's strep, find a better doctor. Antibiotics for non-bacterial ailments can make things worse by destroying your native gut microflora, reducing your ability to absorb nutrients, adding diarrhea to your existin
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My wife takes the kids to the doctor every time they have a sore throat or a runny nose, and they walk out with a fist full of antibiotics.
That says a lot about your doctor. The only time I've ever gotten antibiotics for a sore throat / runny nose combo was after my bloodwork came back showing I had a bacterial infection.
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I can't even remember the last time I considered taking a sore throat/ runny nose combo to the doctors. If it ever happened (and I can't remember it), it would have been before I could walk to school on my own.
Outside the incipient diabetes (which was only detected because of compulsory biannual medicals at work), the last time I took a medical issue to the quack it was just after coming back from working in Africa, when I'd ca
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No, but a lot of them did.
Most sore throats are viral [yalemedicine.org] and not life threatening, but even with antibiotics available, strep throat kills over 1,000 people a year [everydayhealth.com] in the US, and if you get a blood infection [cdc.gov] from it, it can kill in 25% to 70% of cases.
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Did everyone who got a sore throat die from it?
More or less all children.
Have 12 kids so you can be sure 3-4 of them become adults to keep you in your old age.
Re:Duh (Score:4, Interesting)
Cue my Romanian friends, who take antibiotics every time they get the sniffles. And because the doctors in Germany won't prescribe them a course of antibiotics for most things, they'll have friends import it from Romania where they get it by bribing a doctor (one of the legacies of the Communist regime, horrible corruption almost everywhere).
Oh, most of them are also very skeptical of "Big Pharma", but still at the same time eating antibiotics like candy.
But of course this is also a case of deflecting responsibility.
Mass lifestock farming probably shares a very good chunk of the total responsibility here.
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Mass livestock farming probably deserves well over half of the allocated responsibility. But even individual farmers want antibiotics for their animals. My grandfather used to feed his cow (sometimes cows) tetracycline.
OTOH, it's more complicated than that. Most antibiotics are based around something that grows wild in the ground. The bacteria that emitted it used it against their competitors. So the competitors developed ways around the antibiotics. And lots of bacteria exchange genes fairly freely.
Duh to the max (Score:2)
Just last night I heard a great story through my wife about her coworkers. (Everyone works from home these days, but these people all used to see each other daily.) Many of them have COVID, right now. One of them in particular was pretty sure he could tough it out, which is why he and his entire family were unvaccinated (I guess if you are young and strong, it logically follows that everyone you love is also young and strong). So his entire family (parents, wife, kids) got COVID. Total plague house.
For the
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in other words COVID-19 itself really was not his problem it was infact that easily treated pneumonia! Now sure COIVD might have left him more susceptible to pneumonia but that really isn't the point. Had he got the pneumonia first and than contracted COVID (hell maybe he did we don't know) he would have had the same experience.
The STORY here really is a bunch of assholes who assume that just because they may have more expertise the lay person can't be right decided to punish him by denying treatment for h
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He wasn't denied treatment as a punishment. He was unable to get much treatment because he got a severe case of COVID at the same exact time that a bunch of other people were having severe cases of COVID, so there just aren't enough workers to handle it. Everyone knew this was going to happen (and for the last few months, we even knew when it was going to happen), and each individual person (or at least each adult) made a choice about whether to be low-risk or high-risk, so that they could influence whether
The correct link (Score:2)
https://www.thelancet.com/jour... [thelancet.com]
Also (Score:3)
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That's one of the common threads that links the rise of many modern diseases. And also one of the things that alternative medicine picked up on decades before it reached the "mainstream."
We assume that foods/medicines/vaccines/toxins/etc. are safe if they do not harm our own cells, but, if they harm the microbiome, then they often end up harming us as well.
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I should have also mentioned increased emotional stress. [nih.gov]
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Stress is a killer also. We were not designed to live in a constant state of fight-or-flight.
I'm not disagreeing with this, but how are other prey species different from us? Deer, for example, seem to fall into the "constant state of fight-or-flight." How is that daily stress handled differently for them? Are their endocrine systems that different?
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One of the points in the book is that instead of just viewing the immune system as a military defense system ready to destroy malicious microbial invaders, it might be more correct to see it as series of park rangers working to maintain a healthy microbiome ecosystem that works best for the host. As the exact same species of microbes can be beneficial in one
FDA is killing us (Score:1)
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Cite a source on that billion dollar figure please. I can find plenty of sources citing how expensive it is to develop new drugs but I don't see a single source on a google search suggesting it costs companies a billion dollars just to get past the FDA.
Re:FDA is killing us (Score:5, Informative)
The major culprit here is the FDA which makes it incredibly costly to get a newly discovered anti-biotic on the market.
Not really. R&D into finding new antibiotics is rather limited. In fact, pharmaceutical companies spend more money on advertising than R&D [pharmacychecker.com]. Most new drugs are made by researchers at universities. [cbo.gov]
Re: (Score:2)
we need to increase the pace of innovation by abolishing the FDA and similar evil bullies around the world who are causing the deaths of millions of people
Was this intentionally ironic? You do know that the FDA exists because companies were putting all kinds of shit in their "patent medicines," and other miracle drugs, which were killing people, or at least ripping them off, at best. Now, maybe there's a happy medium where getting FDA approval isn't so arduous - and I used to work in the diagnostics healthcare industry, so I'm aware of the hassles the FDA presents - but to suggest we completely get rid of government oversight puts us at the mercy of corpor
There is a way. (Score:2)
There were two areas of interest for fighting bacteria: antibiotics and bacteriophages. Antibiotics were greatly favored as they worked like a catchall for bacteria at the time. However, bacteriophages are amazing critters that are like highly specialized viruses because they attach themselves to chemically specific membranes and then inject their DNA. Like nano-sized assassins they bumble into a target, inject the payload, which replicates many thousands of times until all the resources are expended and
Covid resembles this (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
I'm sorry to say this, and I desperately hope I'm wrong, but I believe that the ultimate goal here is depopulation, control, and setting precedents for worldwide totalitarian rule.
If it were about actually protecting people, then truthful information about effective prevention and treatment would not have been censored since near the start of the "pandemic."
"Vaccines" that teach the body to make toxic spike proteins, and then to attack its own cells, can only make the general population sicker, not healthie
Re: (Score:3)
>"Vaccines" that teach the body to make toxic spike proteins, and then to attack its own cells, can only make the general population sicker, not healthier.
That is a gross misrepresentation of what happens. The body only attacks the newly created spike proteins, they are only created for a short while and the exact same thing happens if you where to be infected by the real virus anyway. So no, it can only make the population more healthy, not sicker.
Re: (Score:2)
This looks like how Covid is working. The "Vaccines" don't completely protect you. They just lessen the severity, so the strongest of the strains survive to infect someone else.
It has nothing to do with "strongest". The strains that are least similar to the original vaccine strain are the ones that survive. Most of the strains don't survive, and the mutation rate falls through the floor. And then you vaccinate against the few strains that are left, and you're done, assuming OAS doesn't prevent that second round of vaccination from being effective enough.
Stop selling antibiotics over the counter! (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
And in many other countries getting a prescription is as easy as going to someone's office with a sore toe an accidentally sneezing. Antibiotic over-prescription is probably a bigger problem than over the counter sales.
What's next? (Score:2)
Pfffff.. (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
True, but sometimes that underlying condition is something like e. coli getting out of your colon, contamination getting into a cut in your skin, and e. coli colonizing your bloodstream. That would be a good reason to get treated by antibiotics, and no matter how well you keep yourself in balance, things like that
Bacteria Technology (Score:1)
What do you take to improve your well-being? (Score:1)
CDC has interesting data on this (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
I don't know about "structured", but silver works pretty well, at least externally. But copper is a lot cheaper.