Antibiotics & Our Doom

[Akraen]

Schadenfreude: http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/rel ... report/en/" target="_blank

I was on board with this just from the preliminary research done in 2010. I haven't had any type of antibiotic since then, aside from the rare unintentional meat I might've had in a restaurant once or twice a year that I couldn't be certain if it was injected or not. Probably no big deal.

Anyway just about everyone argues me, or agrees and does nothing. To this date I'm the only person I know who truly restructured his diet and dealt with the loss of some tasty stuff. Yeah it's hard, yeah it's a life change, but if people keep being short-sighted, we're all going to be in a Monty Python sketch.

It's bigger than that, though. It's not individualized. You all, doctors, vets, and more are continuing the use of antibiotics. Which means even though I'm doing everything correctly, bacteria has and will continue to evolve and spread that can also endanger me.

So the ignorance of the masses are punishing the few.

[Kver]

I hardly ever have antibiotics, the exception being my time spent in hospital. I believe that sadly I do not contribute a lot though. It needs to be dealt with through policy, not choices of individuals.

[Ragiousmagus]

I'd argue that the biggest contributing factor is a lack of education and understanding within the general populace as to the importance of finishing antibiotic prescriptions even when symptoms have disappeared and taking the medication exactly as prescribed and advised. I see the loss of function of antibiotics due to bacterial immunity and climate change as a result of carbon emissions as the two greatest tragedies my generation will face. And they were all completely preventable.

[Akraen]

And people seem to be in the most denial about both as well... not just 'merikuh either.

[Shangalar]

How exactly did you change your diet Akraen? If you refuse to eat meat from unverified sources, that's kind of ok, but meat is the strongest thing you can eat to buff your immune system and prevent illness because it provides the most useful and least-wasteful nutrients to your body. Of course a healthy diet needs to incorporate all nutrients, but meat is kind of the thing that should be eaten relatively often.

And I've noticed that having reasonable sleeping habits benefits the immune system a lot.

I also haven't taken any antibiotics in years because I wasn't ill. I kind of often take painkillers, but they're different chemicals.

[Akraen]

How exactly did you change your diet Akraen? If you refuse to eat meat from unverified sources, that's kind of ok, but meat is the strongest thing you can eat to buff your immune system and prevent illness because it provides the most useful and least-wasteful nutrients to your body. Of course a healthy diet needs to incorporate all nutrients, but meat is kind of the thing that should be eaten relatively often.

And I've noticed that having reasonable sleeping habits benefits the immune system a lot.

I also haven't taken any antibiotics in years because I wasn't ill. I kind of often take painkillers, but they're different chemicals.

One good thing about the US is the amount of land we have and small-time farmers. I actually drove out about 100km to a farm and met some of the cows, chickens, and turkeys I eat while they were alive. Spoke with the farmers, and set up a plan where they deliver their completely untainted by chemicals/antibiotics, grass-fed (not finished) cows, etc. to my local farmer's market every Saturday. I also get unpasteurized grass fed milk from them.

Apart from that I don't eat anything from packages, I stick to raw produce, some fruits but not a lot, and the meat from the farmer.

I very rarely go out to eat, and since that's uncommon (~1-2 times per month) I eat whatever I want then.

[Aowyn]

It's bigger than that, though. It's not individualized. You all, doctors, vets, and more are continuing the use of antibiotics. Which means even though I'm doing everything correctly, bacteria has and will continue to evolve and spread that can also endanger me.

Antibiotics were one of the earlier medicine discoveries for to treat severe diseases; at the time, many evolutionary implications that are now well studied were, at best, foreseen by a few, and alternative medical methods were yet to achieve comparable efficacy to those antibiotics.

Pathogenic organisms have evolved to endanger us for a much longer time, though. You can see cycles of adaptative fitness between host-parasit as they adapt as fast as they can to surpass the other's mechanisms. As one side gains an advantage, individuals of the other are selected based on their fitness against that new advantage. That's what is happening with pathogenic bacteria against our antibiotics and that's what will likely happen with us as they gain any advantage that we can't negate with drugs: we will be selected based on our body's ability to negate that.

About this, you can find studies where many generations of a specie and a pathogen were preserved and put together later to evaluate how their mecahnisms fared. Normally, mixed generations showed either an innefective pathogen or a hopeless host; those from the same generations had a stable efficacy, each well adapted to the other. Exceptions are when one side is too slow to adapt, as seen with the smallpox.

Medicine is now wiser in how to employ these drugs to prevent accelerated evolution. One of the best methods is, ironically, to use more than one antibiotic at the same time. This is meant to reduce the likelihood to have any resistant individual left that is also able to survive our immune system long enough for its transmission; it has shown good results when treating AIDS and is long used in nature.

Plants in particular use that idea: they produce a huge number of different antibiotics and use them all at once when invaded by a pathogen. They don't have an adaptative system (as far as we know) comparable to that seen in animals, so they rely mostly on this strategy instead. That's also the reason why plants are a common source for new antibiotics and medicines; among that huge mix of substances, there's a good chance that one of them, or a combination of them, will work against a disease. And that's why, sometimes, a medicine meant for one disease happens to work against another unrelated one.

We must be wiser in how we use our medical tools, but you shouldn't panic about the evolution seen by these parasitic bacteria yet. They have done that for millenia and we, too, have evolved against them every time a new baby is born. The matter of the report is that we are exhausting too fast the advantage we earned with the current antibiotics, faster than our ability to refine new methods to combat them; the real matter is whether we are able to sustain that advantage even being as wise as possible with how we use what is at our disposal.