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antibiotic resistance


the stinking enigma

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"Prof Walsh is meeting both the agricultural and health ministries this weekend to discuss whether colistin should be banned for agricultural use."

 

So, they have been feeding the antibiotic of last resort to animals? We really do deserve this outcome.

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Stinky, why don't you at least edit your first post to add a tag to the thread title saying "anti-biotic resistance" or something to give people at least some clue what the thread is about.

 

Wrighty has always been, in my view, remarkably sanguine about antibiotic resistance - link - my understanding is that the medical community is more concerned - link1, link2, link3.

 

Bugs, via rampant lateral gene transfer, can very easily pass on advantageous genes to their cousins, and with huge populations and very high growth rates natural selection is very good at ensuring genes which promote survival are fixed into the population.

 

My understanding is that in the UK multiple times more people die of infections that would have been easily treatable 30 years ago than of terrorism. The trouble is these are statistical deaths basically unrecorded while Paris, Mumbai, Nairobi etc etc are front page news.

 

This isn't going to be the end of the world - but minor surgical procedures are going to get significantly more dangerous, as are the occasional cut and scratch. In many cases it'll "just" be a case of blood poisoning, but for some it'll be fatal. The result will definitely be increased death rates.

 

Wrighty, this might be too personal a question, but is loosing losing* someone, say an old Lady, to an opportunistic infection a once a decade, once a year, once a month experience?

 

*That spelling always gets me! Corrected it in time, before I get a pm from the Old Git gently reminding me of my error! ;-)

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Sorry china I actually dont know how to. I'm happy if someone else wants to and can change it . I do realise its a very serious issue but at the time I must confess it was far more important to me to have a gentle joke with someone I don't even know. Sorry, would also genuinely like to hear wrighty's view, would have asked him directly but may have got the spelling wrong and I know how much that annoys him

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@Stinky, All you do is hit the Edit button in your very first post in this thread. Then click Use Full Editor. When you do so scroll to the top of the page and there will be the title and tags.

 

Edit and/or add as you wish.

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A good mate of mine has been in a French hospital for 2 months following an accident and now has a left leg he can hardly move. His right leg which he can move had an ankle injury which became infected. Due to the obvious need to get this infection under control they have tried very hard with the best of their antibiotic armamentarium but last Saturday told him they were having no effect on the infection. The only way to save his life was to amputate just below the knee. Either that or dead by Christmas. That surgery has now been done and continued mobility will now be a huge challenge.

 

This was a common type of story prior to the 50s and I fear it will become common again unless we accept some big changes in antibiotic use.

 

Apologies if this story is unpleasant but the real outcome of antibiotic misuse will be very unpleasant indeed.

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Bugs themselves aren't the issue per sé. Most people are carrying around millions of them inside us, it's only when the immune system becomes compromised to such an extent that they proliferate. It's the environment not the bugs that are the issue. Create a healthy environment and fill it with plenty of natural anti-bacterial, anti-fungal, anti-inflammatory foods and products and you can fight off most things.

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I agree with the sentiment Lxxx but there's a bit of wishful thinking in your post. Even bacteria that do you no harm (you might actually need them) in one part of your body can wreak havoc in other parts of that same body. It's not as straightforward an issue as you have described.

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To me, this is just one more aspect of the conceit of man. We think we are a whole lot smarter than we actually are and we always have. I am old enough to remember reading reports in the 60s that held out the prospect of a world that had beaten harmful infections through science. Antibiotics would make serious infectious diseases a thing of the past. The list of killer illnesses that had been beaten was growing and people would soon live to 150. How wrong we were. Even when we knew that the bacteria were fighting back and mutating to beat our efforts, we remained complacent and we misused the weapons that we had as outlined in the linked article. We are still doing so. If there is profit to be made from using our precious drugs in both human medicine and agriculture, then that is what will happen and damn the consequences.

 

Short term expediency and profit always trump sound planning with the elite. There are so many examples.

 

As Gladys says, nature will act to moderate the exponential rise in human population. This is but one way. There will be others. Yet we go on our merry way expecting life expectancy to continue increasing generation after generation in the face of all the evidence to the contrary.

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