That other resistance
Yes, North Korea, yes, Iran, yes, Yellowstone and global warming and the toxic gas emanating from the White House – but also antibiotic resistance.
England’s chief medical officer has warned of a “post-antibiotic apocalypse” as she issued a call to action urging global leaders to address the growing threat of antibiotic resistance.
Professor Dame Sally Davies said that if antibiotics lose their effectiveness it will spell “the end of modern medicine”.
Without the drugs used to fight infections, common medical interventions such as caesarean sections, cancer treatments and hip replacements would become incredibly “risky”, she said.
And transplant medicine would be a “thing of the past”, she added.
It will be the way it was before penicillin, when an ordinary bacterial disease could kill you at any time.
Health experts have previously warned that resistance to antimicrobial drugs could cause a bigger threat to mankind than cancer.
In recent years, the UK has led a drive to raise global awareness of the threat posed to modern medicine by antimicrobial resistance (AMR).
Around 700,000 people around the world die annually due to drug-resistant infections including tuberculosis (TB), HIV and malaria.
If no action is taken, it has been estimated that drug-resistant infections will kill 10 million people a year by 2050.
Dress warmly, get enough sleep, cook chicken thoroughly.
This is truly terrifying.
Not to mention the common and garden variety infections that minor wounds get. One minutes, you’ve got a torn nail on your big toe, a week later you’re missing a foot or on your way to worse. That was life in pre-antibiotic days. Sure lots of people survived and were healthy, but lots didn’t and we tend to forget that. Wander around graveyards and look at how many children and birthing mothers used to die, then look at the 1960’s era on.
We understandably use science on an everyday basis to defeat the process of natural selection first identified by Charles Darwin.
For example,Nature has had several opportunities during the course of my own life to call ‘last drinks’ and close the bar to any more. Beginning in early childhood, I have had my tonsils, adenoids, appendix, a few teeth, and 2 eye lenses removed and/or replaced, and have just had a shunt installed to drain the ventricles of my brain to counter normal-pressure hydrocephalus, which results in loss of balance, amongst other symptoms.
If nothing else, normal Darwinian selection would probably have seen me succumb to micro-organisms of some kind long ago.
My Irish great-grandmother had 11 children, 10 of whom died in infancy, leaving my maternal grandmother as the sole survivor. She in turn managed to have 4 children, only one of whom died in infancy. My mother had 2, both survivors.
I incline to the view that women are set up by Nature to have so many offspring in order to cope with the pressure of natural selection. (According to the Guinness Book of Records, the record for one woman is 69.) But medical science opposes this process, and quite understandably.
Clearly, the modern suburban family is an historical and biological aberration. Most wild organisms are taken out long before they get to reproduce.
http://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/most-prolific-mother-ever
One good piece of news is that studies have shown that if you back off an antibiotic for a while, the effectiveness returns. The problem is, we don’t seem to be able (or willing) to do that.
When I was living in Oklahoma and Texas, a lot of people I know would go across the border to get antibiotics over the counter. They insisted on antibiotics every time they had a viral infection. Doctors would prescribe them because they worried that if something happened the patient would litigate…it’s easier to prescribe than not to prescribe. But we’ve known about resistance for a long time, and should have been backing them off.
iknklast
Any beginning biology or medical student could have predicted what has happened. Letting these valuable biochemical substances get snatched up and routinely added to animal feeds is perhaps the most brainless aspect of the whole business, and intensive animal husbandry is mainly to blame. Factory farming generates the need for this practice, which is why IMHO it should be totally banned. Ludicrously, the antibiotics routinely shovelled into animal feed in factory farming can generally only be obtained for human use on prescription from a general practitioner.
BUT ON THE BRIGHT SIDE, antibiotics (eg penicillin) were only discovered because they are still active perhaps millions of years after having first appeared and been selected in by fungi and other organisms.
Omar, I agree with you 100%. And the thing is, most people aren’t really aware this is happening. When we discuss it in my classes, my students are totally surprised (and we live in farming country). The problem is, the farm lobby is so strong that it is difficult to get any legislation passed regulating farming practices. For a long time, agriculture has been exempted from clean air laws, and recently were told they were going to have to meet some of the standards. To listen to the folks around here, you’d think they were being told they had to sacrifice their first born to Vishnu.
I don’t anticipate this will change any time soon. I am not optimistic.
It’s another argument for a single payer health system with antibiotics available only on prescription. Of course the internet and global travel are messing that up a bit but I think awareness is probably higher in the UK than elsewhere.
Every GP’s surgery in the UK carries multiple information posters about what antibiotics do not usually work for – colds, flu, most sore throats etc. People still ask but GPs are bound by the BMA not to prescribe them unless there are clinical signs of a bacterial infection.
That’s a reasonably easy problem to solve. Harder is to get antibiotics out of the food chain and out of the environment. As iknklast says we need to reform industrial farming methods to reduce the use of antibiotics and eliminate the need for blanket use. Yep, expensive, and contrary to some powerful vested interests. I, too, am not optimistic. There’s a perfect storm of side effects from out ultra industrialised, over consuming life styles on their way. The chances of our current industrial civilisation surviving in its current form is, in my opinion, very remote.
We also need research and development of new antibiotics, which is not profitable and therefore needs funding from Big Bad Government, which as we all know is big and bad and evil and should stop using precious tax dollars on egghead sciencey bullshit and let the Free Market take care of things.
I’m only here in the first place because of antibiotics. My maternal grandmother died of TB when my father was in his early teens. A couple of years later, he was about to die of the same disease when his life was saved by antibiotics. By the time I was born, there was a vaccine and I was immunised against TB along with my other infant vaccines (smallpox, diphtheria, tetanus).
Of course, my children got a wider range of vaccines and my grandchildren wider still, and there have been plenty of opportunities in my own life for microbes to kill me if it weren’t for modern antibiotics, not to mention other interventions by science-based medicine and pharmaceuticals.
I am furious on behalf of future generations that current generations are abusing such a wonderful discovery in the name of profit. Governments could start by banning all animal produce from sale if the animal concerned is on, or has recently had a course of, antibiotics.
Oh, and to give you an idea of the time scale I was talking about, between my grandmother dying of TB and myself not even at risk of catching it, due to being vaccinated: my father’s brother was a toddler when my grandmother died. He’s only eight years older than me.