Imagining the Post-Antibiotics Future

[FarCenter]

After 85 years, antibiotics are growing impotent. So what will medicine, agriculture and everyday life look like if we lose these drugs entirely?

https://medium.com/p/892b57499e77/

With antibiotics losing usefulness so quickly — and thus not making back the estimated $1 billion per drug it costs to create them — the pharmaceutical industry lost enthusiasm for making more. In 2004, there were only five new antibiotics in development, compared to more than 500 chronic-disease drugs for which resistance is not an issue — and which, unlike antibiotics, are taken for years, not days. Since then, resistant bugs have grown more numerous and by sharing DNA with each other, have become even tougher to treat with the few drugs that remain. In 2009, and again this year, researchers in Europe and the United States sounded the alarm over an ominous form of resistance known as CRE, for which only one antibiotic still works.

...

In 2009, three New York physicians cared for a sixty-seven-year-old man who had major surgery and then picked up a hospital infection that was “pan-resistant” — that is, responsive to no antibiotics at all. He died fourteen days later. When his doctors related his case in a medical journal months afterward, they still sounded stunned. “It is a rarity for a physician in the developed world to have a patient die of an overwhelming infection for which there are no therapeutic options,” they said, calling the man’s death “the first instance in our clinical experience in which we had no effective treatment to offer.”

...

Many treatments require suppressing the immune system, to help destroy cancer or to keep a transplanted organ viable. That suppression makes people unusually vulnerable to infection. Antibiotics reduce the threat; without them, chemotherapy or radiation treatment would be as dangerous as the cancers they seek to cure. Dr. Michael Bell, who leads an infection-prevention division at the CDC, told me: “We deal with that risk now by loading people up with broad-spectrum antibiotics, sometimes for weeks at a stretch. But if you can’t do that, the decision to treat somebody takes on a different ethical tone. Similarly with transplantation. And severe burns are hugely susceptible to infection. Burn units would have a very, very difficult task keeping people alive.”

[Stargazer99]

1. another fine example why capitalism does not work for the common man

[KamaAina]

2. The money quote, literally, is this

With antibiotics losing usefulness so quickly — and thus not making back the estimated $1 billion per drug it costs to create them — the pharmaceutical industry lost enthusiasm for making more.

So we're going to allow society to slide back into the Dark Ages because it affects someone's profit margin?! Time for Evul Soshulist Big Gummint to step in and do it themselves. CDC. WHO. Anyone.

[Brainstormy]

3. SO typical!

of articles that completely miss the point on antibiotics. It's very deep into this article before sub therapeutic treatment of food animals with antibiotics is even mentioned. And the notion that Big Pharma has lost interest in developing antibiotics is laughable. More antibiotics are sold than ever! But they go to industrialized agriculture. 80% of them.

In 1999, and again in 2005, petitions were filed by the Center for Science in the Public Interest, Environmental Defense, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Public Health Association, Food Animal Concerns Trust (FACT), and the Union of Concerned Scientists. Both petitions had asked the agency to withdrawal its approval of certain antimicrobial drugs that are considered important for human medicine. In June 2010, the FDA finally admitted that antibiotics in meat pose a "serious public health threat," but despite this admission, the agency denied both petitions. Instead, in 2011, the agency asked producers to voluntarily use the drugs “judiciously” with the oversight of a veterinarian and pharmaceutical companies to voluntarily reduce sales of antibiotics for use in food animals. The industry response? Sales of the two most commonly used antibiotics in livestock and poultry increased for the second consecutive year.

I'm a food writer and researcher and sincerely believe that this is the NO 1 public health issue in the US. Especially considering the links to obesity, precocious puberty, and more. And more of us now die from MRSA than AIDS.

The finger of blame shouldn't point to doctors and hospitals. It should point to Big Ag, Big Pharma and the FDA.

[Warpy]

4. Death from septic shock isn't a bad way to go

I was hospitalized with septic shock in 2009. I had realized what was going on and was able to call for an ambulance and get in during the "golden window" to get it treated. It was still very much touch and go for 4 days. Should it happen to me if I get much older and after the cat has died, I might even choose to fade out that way should it happen again.

It's why they used to call pneumonia "the old man's friend."

Without effective antibiotics, the kindest thing to do for people with extensive full thickness burns is give them a morphine/Valium IV cocktail to allow them a relaxed and kind way out.

In fact, I've always thought they should be offered that option now.

[ConcernedCanuk]

5. probiotics - I've taken them for decades.

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herbs

other ancient remedies, etc.,

I'm 63, pretty much been drinking and smoking since a young adult,

yet friends of mine who never smoked, never drank, or drank so little it was negligible are dead or dying from health issues.

Most antibiotics prescribed for me I never take - every time I tried antibiotics for one thing or another the side-effects were scary.

Most recently was a major extraction of 7 rotten teeth - within 2 days of taking antibiotics I had a rash on my hands, the palms no less, that itched like crazy, as well as the "normal" diarrhea (that's the doctor's description - shittin ur brains out is "normal" on antibiotics) .

Antibiotics were stopped(by me) and I started on a regimen of probiotics, a non-alcohol mouthwash for the gums, and carefully cleaning the sockets left by the extractions after each meal.

Bowels back to normal in 2 days, rash gone in 3 days, no infections,

So - I'm part way there on the Post-Antibiotics Future - I can't do much about what they pump into me in the hospital when I'm "under",

BUT - I have pissed off a few doctors and nurses by refusing to taking medication in the hospital unless they told me what it was.

And ya know what? - some of the nurses had to go back to find out exactly what it was they were giving me! -

That's a bit scary in itself, doncha think?

Last time I required hospitalization, they gave me some pills to take just before I was to be discharged.

I refused - they said "well, we can't discharge you unless you take the pills".

My response? - "Well then, could you at least change the sheets on my bed?"

They discharged me.

I survived.



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