> Last year, the chief medical officer for England, Prof Dame Sally Davies, said the rise in drug-resistant infections was comparable to the threat of global warming.
Perhaps I lack proper context, but drug-resistance terrifies me significantly more than global warming. Primarily, I think, because we are still speculating about the consequences of climate change - if not so much its causes. In contrast, we know what a world without antibiotics looks like, and it's pretty horrifying.
The worst case scenario for global warming is that it's an extinction-level event and civilization ends. The worst case scenario for antibiotic resistance is that people live with the medical uncertainties our grandparents and great-grandparents lived with.
Assuming everyone understands that, it's an interesting case study in psychology as to why the second one might be scarier than the first one.
> Primarily, I think, because we are still speculating about the consequences of climate change - if not so much its causes.
This is factually untrue. There is a greater scientific consensus on the origins of anthropogenic climate change than there is on the origins of many common diseases.
The climate change trends are very well known, the models that existed 15 years ago have worked extremely well at predicting current climate trends, and the impact in the food supply chain is being well documented, not to mention the myriad other observed changes in ocean acidity, coastal degradation, Arctic and Antarctic surface ice, Andean permafrost, and desertification, just to name a few areas studies by completely different specialties which are confirming the predictions.
I agree. I recently had to take antibiotics for the first time in as long as I can remember. Without them I probably would have been in significant/debilitating pain for the foreseeable future. At the same time I happened to come across a really long detailed article about antibiotics explaining about the dangers of resistance and life before antibiotics. If we don't fix this or find an alternative solution we'll essentially be going back in time in our health care.
My concern with this line being drawn is the risk of people drawing a line between them and then transferring the overwhelming amount of skepticism of climate change to such a serious topic as this. All we need is to give the anti-vaccine nuts another reason to shit all over herd immunity.
Oddly enough, I can't find a single reference to farms using antibiotics as a growth enhancer in this article. Isn't that the single biggest source of antibiotic-resistant bacteria?
Agricultural use of antibiotics has definitely been an issue, but perhaps they're trying to state narrow conclusions in the name of scientific rigor. Fortunately, in the US at least, the practice is being discontinued. http://www.fda.gov/animalveterinary/guidancecomplianceenforc...
From what I understand, it isn't usually used as a growth enhancer (I may be wrong) but used because of the way livestock is maintained. When you have cows being kept standing in one place to maintain lean meat, they develop infections more so than being able to walk somewhere other than their own feces. So to keep production up and infections down, the livestock gets pumped full of antibiotics.
BTW, you can already see a shift in the industry from calling out the antibiotic use as a growth enhancement, to calling it a preemptive use to prevent sickness. It just happens that when you collect animals together in high density feedlots to fatten them up - it does create increased illness rates - in addition to being a vector for breeding and spreading resistant bacteria.
So the label has changed, but the end effect of pouring tons of antibiotics into conditions that breed resistance is still there unless we change conditions in feedlots.
One alternative to antibiotics that may work, but will have a tremendous difficulty in clearing the regulatory burden for approving new drugs and medical procedures, is bacteriophage therapy.[1]
Nobody's going to fund or approve this in the West anytime soon:
- phage therapists often use cocktails of phages to treat their patient. This type of treatment isn't even on the FDA's map - it even takes years for compounds of conventional drugs to be approved.
- phage therapists often prepare customized phage cultures to treat a specific patient's infection. The FDA would likely view this a a crime and prosecute anyone trying it.
- phage therapies have been around for over 100 years and are likely unpatentable. No drug company will fund R&D on the technique and no venture capitalist will fund a scrappy startup.
For those with a computational/hacker background wanting to make a difference:
There is actually a lot of opportunity in the Computational Biology/Drug Development/Genomics space, with the caveat that it is a very difficult field (especially for company creation). It's a lot easier for CS folks to build another no-SQL database than it is to build a ML framework for, say, cancer prediction, but the opportunity is there. A lot of folks in this space come from the bio side, and teach themselves programming. Very few folks come from the CS side, and partner with the biologists. As a result, there is a giant gap between what is possible for a computer scientist and what is currently being executed. The state of the art in this space will probably make you all very sad.
I will pay $$ for engineers to work on this:
I have a side project working with an academic lab to develop a new antibiotic to target drug resistant beta lactamase (the primary protein associated with drug resistance) using a relatively novel computational approach. Sadly I've been distracted by my primary job, but if you are interested let me know. I am based in SF.
Whilst I totally appreciate the seriousness of this, I still don't get what exactly I can do about this. Most likely, nothing.
Therefore, much like the potentially developing WW3 in Ukraine, or Ebola outbreak in Africa, or rape culture in India, this kind of news is fairly useless. It just creates negative feelings with no positive outcome.
I'm happy to be convinced otherwise - what can I do about this?
The best thing you can do is keep informed, and keep others around you informed. Many people don't realize this is such a rapidly progressing issue. In fact, many people may not even know that they are improperly taking their Antibiotics and what the side effects are to doing so.
If more informed I feel like the public could do a bit better at turning down Antibiotics when they aren't necessary, and using them properly when they are. Just that action would go a long way.
Edit- I would also like to add that a lot of people don't realize just how easy it is to get an infection, and education could go a long way in keeping it from happening in the first place. It reminds me of that guy on reddit with the horrible case of necrotizing fasciitis that he ended up with after retrieving a football from a koi pond. His day by day imgur chronicle was both interesting and horrifying.
Pressure your government (where ever you may be) to make responsible use of antibiotics a priority.
The misuse that terrifies me the most are antibiotics used on livestock. Particularly the antibiotics that are also used on humans. In my opinion antibiotics should not be used as a growth promoter and only used to help sick animals.
New mechanisms of action are needed, more specifically, mechanisms that evolution cannot biologically defeat. Consider an agent like bleach, 99.99% effective because the makeup of a cell does not really permit it to protect against such a caustic agent. Clearly bleach can't be used as an antiobitic but I use it to illustrate the point that a evolutionary-unlikely antibiotic mechanism would be worldly profound.
The primary source of antibiotic abuse is in farm animals.
Do you really want to help? Start eating less meat, and tell others to also do so. Tell them why. Tell them to also tell others. When there is less demand for meat, then there will be less land devoted to animal feed/grazing, and more to food crops. Less animals that can be infected, less antibiotics used, etc, etc.
Want to really help solve it? Don't eat meat. Get others to stop eating meat.
Invest in faux/lab-grown meat companies. Disease free meat can be grown. We just need to make it profitable.
Honestly, this is the future. Farming like this is unsustainable, not only for the antibiotic reasons.
(I'll spare everyone the ethical/transhumanist discussion.)
If your doctor is prescribing you an antibiotic, you can ask them what the pros and cons are of taking it. If you are willing to deal with the cons, then maybe don't take the antibiotic. Usually, the con will be that you feel sick for a bit longer. Note though, that you might need them to get over whatever it is you have.
I will echo lucky's sentiment - staying educated, and educating others around you, goes a big way. I know people very close to me who still believe it's okay to stop taking antibiotics the moment they feel better, rather than finishing out the entire prescription.
I'd like to believe that buying meat / other foods that aren't treated with antibiotics could make a difference as well, but I'm not sure how much impact that would have.
>> "Whilst I totally appreciate the seriousness of this, I still don't get what exactly I can do about this. Most likely, nothing."
I think you can help by informing others. If you know a family member not completing their course of antibiotics for example explain to them why it's so important.
Not sure why swombat got downvoted, he makes good points. Heck, once in a while, an HN submission for along the lines of "Why reading news is harmful and why you shouldn't read it" goes by, and it gets upvoted a lot.
What can the general public do about this? It's not like I can go to my family physician and tell him to use less antibiotics (he already doesn't; I'm in the Netherlands), and expect to make any kind of meaningful difference. This is one of those "tragedy of the commons" kind of problems that can only be solved if everybody cooperates.
Donate to research groups that are working on ways of controlling bacterial and viral infections that are a step beyond the present status quo. Things like DRACO [1] spring to mind. Present day fundamental (as opposed to translational) biomedical research is very cheap in comparison to the state of things even a decade or two ago. Small fundraising groups can make a big impact now.
Be educated about it, and educate others. Eventually, you will be called on to vote on something, and some intrenched interest will try to convince you that it is an encroachment of big government on the sovereignty of job creators. Good luck trying to teach them then.
That's true for pretty much all significant news. And it's not like we are helpless, it's still possible to invest in new antibiotics and strictly control the ones that still work.
I think to make a dent in this problem we need to change many aspects of our culture and how we live: 1) that any annoying problem should have an immediate and rapid solution so that we can get on with our lives, 2) that we as people need to live in a bubble ecosystem from the rest of the natural world.
1) I stopped taking most medicines awhile ago because I realized that by relying on symptomatic relief, I wasn't actually listening to the needs of my body. Now when I feel a cold coming on, I start sleeping at 9pm, eat healthier, and reduce stress levels. Instead of popping a pill, I've learned to recognize that I'm deviating from "healthy" activity and had better get on track. The result? I haven't been sick in years and years, and am probably overall a more healthy, less stressed out person.
2) I often wonder to what degree language affects perception. Like the word dirty having such a negative stereotype yet so associated with dirt (i.e., soil). I feel like we often want such high levels of sterility that are just absurd, and do more to harm us in the long run. As part of a project, I interviewed farmers who said food safety experts are so draconian they expect cannons that shoot into the air to prevent birds from flying over with the risk of droppings. One food safety inspector commented that the farm was too "dirty." Can you imagine? I understand we don't want to get sick, there are bad things in the world, but I think we're pushing too far into the other end of the spectrum.
The threat we now are facing with these resistant strains of bacteria are the main reason I got interested in the Public Health field. I am only in my second semester, going part time, but look forward to trying to address the growing need for infectious treatment "reform."
Antibiotic resistance is a fact, what else can you expect given the game rules. What is less well known is that majority of people do not need antibiotics anyway and that majority of those who were taking them probably didn't need them too. Advice that recommended AB's before for stuff like otitis, helicobacter infection or even common cold (given for this disease because of opportunistic infections) is now changing without any problems, if anything, for the better.
AB's should be saved for those few moments in life where you really need them and is not something you want to do every few months like majority of people, particularly kids.
There are far better ways to strengthen your body and immune system without risks that are overwhelming with AB's (which are way better known today after we have some bits of microbiome) - nutrition and supplements. Even measures like using viruses as antibiotics are probably better then popping AB's like candies.
This news is probably beginning of the "next big big pharma thingy" that will come to rescue and will typically, yet again, use inappropriate tool for the job. The only good that will come out of it are probably not going to be, however, lives saved but science advancement.
Here is a link to the World Health Organization media release[1] about the new WHO report, which links to a fact sheet summary[2] of the findings, and to the full report.[3] What's new here is the comparative data from different countries. It has been known for a while that multidrug-resistant tuberculosis is a grave problem in India,[4] for example, but the new report makes clear that antibiotic-resistant microorganisms that cause major human disease are present all over the world.
Some of the other comments posted here ask, well, what can we do about this? A submission to Hacker News from 189 days ago linked to a PBS report about the views of a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention epidemiologist in the United States[5] who advocated specific policy changes, some of which have been adopted since then. The discussion of that submission (including one of my highest-karma-ever comments[6]) provides more perspective on some biological evolution issues that are being brought up again in today's discussion here.
In America, the number one thing you can do is stop eating factory farmed meat. That is a huge contributor to antibiotics resistance. Either eat mainly vegan or spend the few extra dollars to buy meat that isn't gross. Remember, it is MORE EXPENSIVE in the long run to buy that cheap meat. When you have a routine infection that can't be cured with antibiotics, the hospital bills will be far more then the few dollars you saved. Eat less meat. Oh, and you'll massively reduce your carbon footprint as well, and you'll use less land and water, and you'll be healthier (if you cut out red meat). It really is a no brainer.
So every few weeks we get these news but this isn't reversible anyway i guess. Does this basically mean a lot more people will die from simple infections starting 1-2 years from now ? How likely is it that new antibiotics will be developed ?
By reading articles like these it sounds like we are facing a massive increase in deaths from illnesses, yet the general public doesn't seem to care much. Genuinely curious.
Scientists worry about the cuts to NIH funding, but the cuts to pharmaceutical research are ten times more worrying - who is going to develop the compounds to replace the current set of antibiotics when they have become useless? Wall Street is entirely unequipped to deal with this question; there are things that cannot be bought with money or at market, and scientific progress is one of them.
Pfizer got out of antibacterial R&D a few years back.
And I have to take issue with your comment "scientific progress can't be bought with money". What do you call all the new drugs that have been produced in the last century? It wasn't done by the government. Yes, basic research funded by the NIH advanced basic science, but it didn't put those pills in a bottle.
"who is going to develop the compounds to replace the current set of antibiotics when they have become useless" - Academic science. Most of the basic, foundational research in clinical medicine is done by academia, not the pharmaceutical industry.
I have long thought that humans (at least those living in the first world) had developed civilization to a point where natural selection was not really operating anymore. We can shelter ourselves, feed ourselves, and cure illnesses and injuries so well that almost all of us live to reproduce and raise our children to the point where they can take care of themselves. We haven't even had a large-scale war in the time that most of us have been alive. But on evolutionary timescales, we've really lived this way for only the blink of an eye. So maybe I'm wrong. This is a reminder that we live in a larger ecosystem that we really have a lot less control over than we might think. Nature has a way of keeping things in balance, and it's never pretty.
Is there any particular reason we can't just create new antibiotics? Is there something inherent in the current design of antibiotics that prevents creating new versions of what we have? If so, is there an 'upper limit' of how many we can create, and have we reached it already?
Homeopathy offers remedies for antibiotic resistant infections. I had a relative who had severe infection post knee replacement surgery. She was operated 4 times due to this infection as the bacteria is considered antibiotic resistant. A classical homeopath treated her to recover from the infection.
This is the bacteria that caused the post surgery infection
Yip, this is definitely a serious threat, one that will affect the rich in ways that climate change won't so immediately do. Probably a good thing in terms of finding a solution ;)
I did come across (I forget where) a very interesting talk which was outlining new techniques in antibiotics. The basic idea was that instead of straight out killing them (in which some breed resistance) instead you get in the middle of their chemical signals and basically tell them to attach before they've reached the point where the immune system won't win.
Still, bacteria being bacteria they'll probably work their way around it, but maybe rewriting your messaging system is a little harder than breeding resistance.
Instead of developing more antibiotics, can we reengineer these disease bacterias with a kill switch built in? Then release them into the wild to compete with non-engineered species and eventually displace them?
On a personal note, my mom is still under the weather, having stuck to three different courses of antibiotics for a simple nasal infection.
It's frightening when this becomes the norm, not the exception because we're basically running out of options by natural selection moving faster than research.
We need a crash program to develop antibiotics before it's too late.
I would like to know why wouldn't it work to simply flood hospital rooms (any time they were empty) with lethal (for bacteria) doses of non-ionizing radiation (or any kind that doesn't go through walls and don't make said walls radioactive) so that those pesky tolerant strains have a really hard time propagating
[+] [-] doktrin|12 years ago|reply
Perhaps I lack proper context, but drug-resistance terrifies me significantly more than global warming. Primarily, I think, because we are still speculating about the consequences of climate change - if not so much its causes. In contrast, we know what a world without antibiotics looks like, and it's pretty horrifying.
[+] [-] justin66|12 years ago|reply
Assuming everyone understands that, it's an interesting case study in psychology as to why the second one might be scarier than the first one.
[+] [-] Daishiman|12 years ago|reply
This is factually untrue. There is a greater scientific consensus on the origins of anthropogenic climate change than there is on the origins of many common diseases.
The climate change trends are very well known, the models that existed 15 years ago have worked extremely well at predicting current climate trends, and the impact in the food supply chain is being well documented, not to mention the myriad other observed changes in ocean acidity, coastal degradation, Arctic and Antarctic surface ice, Andean permafrost, and desertification, just to name a few areas studies by completely different specialties which are confirming the predictions.
[+] [-] k-mcgrady|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] luckyno13|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] _dark_matter_|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] mullingitover|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CapitalistCartr|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anigbrowl|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] luckyno13|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] digikata|12 years ago|reply
So the label has changed, but the end effect of pouring tons of antibiotics into conditions that breed resistance is still there unless we change conditions in feedlots.
[+] [-] jff|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JoeAltmaier|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jmcmichael|12 years ago|reply
Nobody's going to fund or approve this in the West anytime soon:
- phage therapists often use cocktails of phages to treat their patient. This type of treatment isn't even on the FDA's map - it even takes years for compounds of conventional drugs to be approved.
- phage therapists often prepare customized phage cultures to treat a specific patient's infection. The FDA would likely view this a a crime and prosecute anyone trying it.
- phage therapies have been around for over 100 years and are likely unpatentable. No drug company will fund R&D on the technique and no venture capitalist will fund a scrappy startup.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phage_therapy
[+] [-] DennisP|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chris_va|12 years ago|reply
For those with a computational/hacker background wanting to make a difference:
There is actually a lot of opportunity in the Computational Biology/Drug Development/Genomics space, with the caveat that it is a very difficult field (especially for company creation). It's a lot easier for CS folks to build another no-SQL database than it is to build a ML framework for, say, cancer prediction, but the opportunity is there. A lot of folks in this space come from the bio side, and teach themselves programming. Very few folks come from the CS side, and partner with the biologists. As a result, there is a giant gap between what is possible for a computer scientist and what is currently being executed. The state of the art in this space will probably make you all very sad.
I will pay $$ for engineers to work on this:
I have a side project working with an academic lab to develop a new antibiotic to target drug resistant beta lactamase (the primary protein associated with drug resistance) using a relatively novel computational approach. Sadly I've been distracted by my primary job, but if you are interested let me know. I am based in SF.
[+] [-] Houshalter|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] swombat|12 years ago|reply
Therefore, much like the potentially developing WW3 in Ukraine, or Ebola outbreak in Africa, or rape culture in India, this kind of news is fairly useless. It just creates negative feelings with no positive outcome.
I'm happy to be convinced otherwise - what can I do about this?
[+] [-] luckyno13|12 years ago|reply
If more informed I feel like the public could do a bit better at turning down Antibiotics when they aren't necessary, and using them properly when they are. Just that action would go a long way.
Edit- I would also like to add that a lot of people don't realize just how easy it is to get an infection, and education could go a long way in keeping it from happening in the first place. It reminds me of that guy on reddit with the horrible case of necrotizing fasciitis that he ended up with after retrieving a football from a koi pond. His day by day imgur chronicle was both interesting and horrifying.
[+] [-] coenhyde|12 years ago|reply
The misuse that terrifies me the most are antibiotics used on livestock. Particularly the antibiotics that are also used on humans. In my opinion antibiotics should not be used as a growth promoter and only used to help sick animals.
[+] [-] goldenkey|12 years ago|reply
New mechanisms of action are needed, more specifically, mechanisms that evolution cannot biologically defeat. Consider an agent like bleach, 99.99% effective because the makeup of a cell does not really permit it to protect against such a caustic agent. Clearly bleach can't be used as an antiobitic but I use it to illustrate the point that a evolutionary-unlikely antibiotic mechanism would be worldly profound.
[+] [-] Slackwise|12 years ago|reply
Do you really want to help? Start eating less meat, and tell others to also do so. Tell them why. Tell them to also tell others. When there is less demand for meat, then there will be less land devoted to animal feed/grazing, and more to food crops. Less animals that can be infected, less antibiotics used, etc, etc.
Want to really help solve it? Don't eat meat. Get others to stop eating meat.
Invest in faux/lab-grown meat companies. Disease free meat can be grown. We just need to make it profitable.
Honestly, this is the future. Farming like this is unsustainable, not only for the antibiotic reasons.
(I'll spare everyone the ethical/transhumanist discussion.)
[+] [-] dfxm12|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] artmageddon|12 years ago|reply
I'd like to believe that buying meat / other foods that aren't treated with antibiotics could make a difference as well, but I'm not sure how much impact that would have.
[+] [-] k-mcgrady|12 years ago|reply
I think you can help by informing others. If you know a family member not completing their course of antibiotics for example explain to them why it's so important.
[+] [-] FooBarWidget|12 years ago|reply
What can the general public do about this? It's not like I can go to my family physician and tell him to use less antibiotics (he already doesn't; I'm in the Netherlands), and expect to make any kind of meaningful difference. This is one of those "tragedy of the commons" kind of problems that can only be solved if everybody cooperates.
[+] [-] exratione|12 years ago|reply
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRACO_(antiviral)
[+] [-] pessimizer|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Houshalter|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jmzbond|12 years ago|reply
1) I stopped taking most medicines awhile ago because I realized that by relying on symptomatic relief, I wasn't actually listening to the needs of my body. Now when I feel a cold coming on, I start sleeping at 9pm, eat healthier, and reduce stress levels. Instead of popping a pill, I've learned to recognize that I'm deviating from "healthy" activity and had better get on track. The result? I haven't been sick in years and years, and am probably overall a more healthy, less stressed out person.
2) I often wonder to what degree language affects perception. Like the word dirty having such a negative stereotype yet so associated with dirt (i.e., soil). I feel like we often want such high levels of sterility that are just absurd, and do more to harm us in the long run. As part of a project, I interviewed farmers who said food safety experts are so draconian they expect cannons that shoot into the air to prevent birds from flying over with the risk of droppings. One food safety inspector commented that the farm was too "dirty." Can you imagine? I understand we don't want to get sick, there are bad things in the world, but I think we're pushing too far into the other end of the spectrum.
[+] [-] luckyno13|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] majkinetor|12 years ago|reply
AB's should be saved for those few moments in life where you really need them and is not something you want to do every few months like majority of people, particularly kids.
There are far better ways to strengthen your body and immune system without risks that are overwhelming with AB's (which are way better known today after we have some bits of microbiome) - nutrition and supplements. Even measures like using viruses as antibiotics are probably better then popping AB's like candies.
This news is probably beginning of the "next big big pharma thingy" that will come to rescue and will typically, yet again, use inappropriate tool for the job. The only good that will come out of it are probably not going to be, however, lives saved but science advancement.
[+] [-] tokenadult|12 years ago|reply
Some of the other comments posted here ask, well, what can we do about this? A submission to Hacker News from 189 days ago linked to a PBS report about the views of a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention epidemiologist in the United States[5] who advocated specific policy changes, some of which have been adopted since then. The discussion of that submission (including one of my highest-karma-ever comments[6]) provides more perspective on some biological evolution issues that are being brought up again in today's discussion here.
[1] http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2014/amr-report...
[2] http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs194/en/
[3] http://www.who.int/drugresistance/documents/surveillancerepo...
[4] http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230344420...
http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2013-06-23/news...
http://www.iom.edu/Reports/2012/Facing-the-Reality-of-Drug-R...
http://www.tbcindia.nic.in/pdfs/RNTCP%20Response%20DR%20TB%2...
[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6599040
[6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6599795
[+] [-] chez17|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kayoone|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] denzil_correa|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] HarryHirsch|12 years ago|reply
It's not to streamline drug development, the deal is a tax dodge in its entirety. Some lovely commentary down the hallway, in the Pipeline: http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2014/04/28/pfizer_and_a...
Scientists worry about the cuts to NIH funding, but the cuts to pharmaceutical research are ten times more worrying - who is going to develop the compounds to replace the current set of antibiotics when they have become useless? Wall Street is entirely unequipped to deal with this question; there are things that cannot be bought with money or at market, and scientific progress is one of them.
[+] [-] refurb|12 years ago|reply
And I have to take issue with your comment "scientific progress can't be bought with money". What do you call all the new drugs that have been produced in the last century? It wasn't done by the government. Yes, basic research funded by the NIH advanced basic science, but it didn't put those pills in a bottle.
[+] [-] lotsofmangos|12 years ago|reply
IBM, with nanotech PET - http://www.research.ibm.com/articles/nanomedicine.shtml#fbid...
And I know it is viruses, not bacteria, but MIT's DRACO is also pretty cool - http://www.ll.mit.edu/news/DRACO.html
[+] [-] Fomite|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ams6110|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] melling|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Orangeair|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mvembu|12 years ago|reply
This is the bacteria that caused the post surgery infection
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acinetobacter_baumannii
Here is a relevant article on how Homeopathy provides an alternative to antibiotics
http://aurumproject.org.au/homeopathy-alternative-antibiotic...
[+] [-] patrickdavey|12 years ago|reply
I did come across (I forget where) a very interesting talk which was outlining new techniques in antibiotics. The basic idea was that instead of straight out killing them (in which some breed resistance) instead you get in the middle of their chemical signals and basically tell them to attach before they've reached the point where the immune system won't win.
Still, bacteria being bacteria they'll probably work their way around it, but maybe rewriting your messaging system is a little harder than breeding resistance.
[+] [-] lightblade|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] midas007|12 years ago|reply
It's frightening when this becomes the norm, not the exception because we're basically running out of options by natural selection moving faster than research.
We need a crash program to develop antibiotics before it's too late.
[+] [-] gabriel34|12 years ago|reply