Imagining the Post-Antibiotics Future

[roo_ster]

Imagining the Post-Antibiotics Future

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

Five years after my great-uncle’s death, penicillin changed medicine forever. Infections that had been death sentences—from battlefield wounds, industrial accidents, childbirth—suddenly could be cured in a few days. So when I first read the story of his death, it lit up for me what life must have been like before antibiotics started saving us.

Lately, though, I read it differently. In Joe’s story, I see what life might become if we did not have antibiotics any more. . . . Before antibiotics, five women died out of every 1,000 who gave birth. One out of nine people who got a skin infection died, even from something as simple as a scrape or an insect bite. Three out of ten people who contracted pneumonia died from it. Ear infections caused deafness; sore throats were followed by heart failure. In a post-antibiotic era, would you mess around with power tools? Let your kid climb a tree? Have another child?

Got the pointer from instapundit.

I dunno, if we are going to war on drug abuse, I think we are pointing the SWATties at the wrong abusers.

Another tough question similar to the those asked in the quote, "Would you let both parents work and leave your kiddo(s) in daycare, where the incidence of ear infections (among others) is so greatly elevated?"

[tokugawa]

no. I don't want to. My parents were depression era- one generation from a time when a compound fracture was a death sentence in many cases.

[AJ Dual]

The thing is that abuse/over-use are only speeding up the inevitable.

Antibiotics are throwing selection criteria into what is arguably the largest massively parallel evolution engine in existence. Umpteen quadrillion germs are going to out-evolve anything we throw at them anyway, unless we took every last person given antibiotics and put them in clean-room conditions to contain every last surviving mutated straggler that was resistant.

I also sense there's a fair amount of alarmism and hyperbole in all these "Antibiotics are going to stop working, returning us to the 1930's!" news stories. Virus/phage therapy, protein folding, benign bacteria counter-colonization... all sorts of other chemical and biological technologies that have not been investigated because of antibiotics are just starting to get some attention.

[MicroBalrog]

I also sense there's a fair amount of alarmism and hyperbole in all these "Antibiotics are going to stop working, returning us to the 1930's!" news stories. Virus/phage therapy, protein folding, benign bacteria counter-colonization... all sorts of other chemical and biological technologies that have not been investigated because of antibiotics are just starting to get some attention.

This.  All of this.

[Blakenzy]

In the mean time... authorities waste all resources controlling the use of dangerous "drugs of abuse"... yeah maryjane-o, I'm looking at you!