Under new plans
Never heard of antibiotic resistance then?
Patients will be able to obtain antibiotics from pharmacies without seeing a doctor under new plans aimed at reducing the need for GP appointments.
Thérèse Coffey, the health secretary, has pushed to make antibiotics more freely available and has said that she has previously handed out her own supplies of the medicines to friends and family who were feeling unwell.
She what???
One, she shouldn’t have “supplies” of antibiotics – you have to take the whole prescription. Two, you’re not supposed to give them away like after dinner mints! Three, they’re not for “feeling unwell”! Four, there are different antibiotics, they’re not interchangeable or random or all-purpose. Five, antibiotic resistance is a crisis the way climate change is a crisis. Six, antibiotics shouldn’t be “more freely available” (see 1-5). Seven, how in hell is this idiot health secretary???
Sources close to the health secretary denied suggestions from sceptical officials that “she thinks anyone should just be able to get antibiotics”, saying that such comments reflected initial questions from her early days in office.
Coffey had to be convinced by Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer, that the rise of antibiotic resistant superbugs was a significant problem, after suggesting at the start of her tenure that the drugs should be made far easier to obtain in order to free up doctors.
So why in hell is she health secretary? No one that ignorant should have that job.
Pushing for easier availability of antibiotics has been branded “moronic” by some medical experts, who increasingly see the menace of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) as one of the gravest threats to modern medicine.
No shit. It’s a horror show.
The overuse of antibiotics speeds up the rate at which bacteria develop resistance to such medicines. As the drugs stop working, common infections could once again kill and treatments ranging from chemotherapy to hip replacements could become too risky to attempt.
And, like climate change, this isn’t some distant future possibility thing, it’s already happening. It’s in progress.
Coffey should be moved to a different post. Secretary of Hobbies perhaps.
This is one of the things that irritates me immensely. The ready availability of antibacterial soap in the US has accelerated the process; it can be difficult to find soap that isn’t antibacterial. My students all assume that’s the only way to fight disease, until I tell them washing with soap and water does just as well. They probably forget that as soon as the test is over. There’s too much misinformation for them to remember something the opposite of what much of society is telling them.
Also the fact that so many people now take them for viruses, which aren’t susceptible to antibacterial medicines. Doctors feel pressured to prescribe them, and some of them (many of them) give in.
I agree, she shouldn’t be Health Secretary.
This irritates me, too.
And we don’t just need new antibiotics, we need new classes of antibiotics. We need ones with different mechanisms of action than the current ones. This is another area where biology is very important. We need to know and understand the biological systems in which we want the antibiotics to work.
About 20 years ago I developed an algorithm for the use of antibiotics in sore throat. It was estimated that if the algorithm had been implemented in the state Medicaid plan, it would have reduced costs more than 1.5 million per year as well as avoiding the risks of unnecessary drug treatment and resistance. This is a horrible idea.
My non-scientific observation about the Common Cold and antibiotics.
If I do nothing, the cold will generally last an agonising 72 hours.
If I take an antibiotic, the cold will be gone in just 3 days.
We need to limit antibiotic use in order to slow resistance. Something I learned years ago is that we also need R&D on antibiotics, so we can stay ahead of the evolving bugs. Unfortunately, such work is not at all profitable, and therefore not enough of it is being done.
Whenever I hear free marketeers fantasizing about how wonderful the world would be if we’d just privatize everything I think of that.
Coffey is a chemist, not a doctor. Brain-dead Tory, Truss appointee. Skim her Wikipedia page and shudder.
JtD, I’ll accept your assessment; she should be a doctor in that position. But chemists should understand this. (I know, I know, most chemists haven’t studied biology, and this is biology. In fact, it’s evolutionary biology, plus pathogenic microbiology – two difficult fields in one). It also touches on the environment, because the antibiotics in our water bodies appears to be causing changes in the bacteria that reside in those places, as well.
iknklast @7:
Agreed, chemists should understand this. And work WITH biologists. If we want to have any chance in hell of making any headway in the “arms race” with bacteria and other pathogens.
I’ve worked in anticancer drug discovery and now work on transfection reagents. I’ve learned some biology while doing this work. I would not be able to do my job nearly as well if I did not learn some biology and did not work with and listen to biologists.