[vox_mundi]

Superbugs will 'kill every three seconds' by 2050

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '[')b]Superbugs will kill someone every three seconds by 2050 unless the world acts now, a hugely influential report says.



The problem is that we are simply not developing enough new antibiotics and we are wasting the ones we have.

Since the Review on Antimicrobial Resistance started in mid-2014, more than one million people have died from such infections.

And in that time doctors also discovered bacteria that can shrug off the drug of last resort - colistin - leading to warnings that the world was teetering on the cusp of a "post-antibiotic era".

The review says the situation will get only worse with 10 million people predicted to die every year from resistant infections by 2050.



Lord Jim O'Neill, the economist who led the global review, told the BBC: "We need to inform in different ways, all over the world, why it's crucial we stop treating our antibiotics like sweets.

"If we don't solve the problem we are heading to the dark ages, we will have a lot of people dying.

http://amr-review.org/

[Newfie]

We haven't done squat about climate change or over population.

I betting we won't do squat about this.

(But then again not doing squat about this IS dealing with over population.)

[vox_mundi]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Newfie', 'W')e haven't done squat about climate change or over population. I betting we won't do squat about this.

(But then again - not doing squat about this IS dealing with over population.)

[onlooker]

Can you imagine the virulence of these Superbugs when even more people are malnourished and undernourished ie. starving. Or even just the fact that people in the US are also vulnerable because of poor diet and being over medicated and as Tanada said having already developed some antibiotic resistance from overusing antibiotics. Add to that how populated we are and how airplanes can bring any bug here or anywhere in little time and you have the makings of a Vast Pandemic. It would of course start in the very poor and overpopulated regions that have malnourished/undernourished people and little health infrastructure and spread from there.

[jedrider]

Looks Bad.

The worst of a 1970's shag rug and a bacterium:

ecoli-1184px[1].jpg

[vtsnowedin]

Ritter wrote.
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '
')I've been aware of this for 20 years, since reading Laurie Garrett's The Coming Plague.

[onlooker]

What about ROUTINE antibiotics prescribed for humans. It seems any little cold or infection now warrants antibiotics, that may not be too wise.

[Tanada]

You can expect a big uptick in child mortality rates in the USA. There are a number of diseases that used to kill 2-5 percent of children that are only treated with antibiotics because vaccines were never developed for them. Every one of them will sooner or later integrate the resistance to all known antibiotics into their genetic structure, at which point a lot more children will start dying every year.

Couple that with the anti-vaxxer crowd and it is going to be a sad time. Part of the reason humans are capable of having a dozen children is the death rate from childhood diseases used to routinely cut the number that reach adulthood in half. Add in accidents from cultures that did not bubble wrap and helicopter in to deal with every very small injury and even with a 8 children you might only have 2 survive to adulthood and pass on your genes.

[vox_mundi]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('onlooker', 'W')hat about ROUTINE antibiotics prescribed for humans. It seems any little cold or infection now warrants antibiotics, that may not be too wise.

[Ibon]

Our ability to overcome our natural predators, germs, was only ever a temporary phenomenon. The irony here is that this ability we achieved could have remained resilient for centuries. We abused the gift this technology gave us just like we abuse the biosphere that sustains us. It is irony because it was our own technology that developed anti biotics and then again our own inability to self regulate that is causing these anti biotics to become undermined.

[vox_mundi]

Lack of self-control seems to be a species trait.

[Subjectivist]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('vox_mundi', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('onlooker', 'W')hat about ROUTINE antibiotics prescribed for humans. It seems any little cold or infection now warrants antibiotics, that may not be too wise.

[Timo]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('vox_mundi', 'D')octors have been told to refrain from over-prescribing antibiotics to their patients, meanwhile, livestock factory farms and feed lots continue to use them by the trainload.

Guess which ones gave more money to Congress.

The problem is global - people who stand to make a profit, place their interests ahead of the commons. And we allow our governments to sanction it.

[Cid_Yama]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'J')ust 65 years ago, David Livermore's paternal grandmother died following an operation to remove her appendix. It didn't go well, but it was not the surgery that killed her. She succumbed to a series of infections that the pre-penicillin world had no drugs to treat. Welcome to the future.

The era of antibiotics is coming to a close. In just a couple of generations, what once appeared to be miracle medicines have been beaten into ineffectiveness by the bacteria they were designed to knock out. Once, scientists hailed the end of infectious diseases. Now, the post-antibiotic apocalypse is within sight.

Hyperbole? Unfortunately not. The highly serious journal Lancet Infectious Diseases yesterday posed the question itself over a paper revealing the rapid spread of multi-drug-resistant bacteria. "Is this the end of antibiotics?" it asked.

Doctors and scientists have not been complacent, but the paper by Professor Tim Walsh and colleagues takes the anxiety to a new level. Last September, Walsh published details of a gene he had discovered, called NDM 1, which passes easily between types of bacteria called enterobacteriaceae such as E. coli and Klebsiella pneumoniae and makes them resistant to almost all of the powerful, last-line group of antibiotics called carbapenems. Yesterday's paper revealed that NDM 1 is widespread in India and has arrived here as a result of global travel and medical tourism for, among other things, transplants, pregnancy care and cosmetic surgery.

"In many ways, this is it," Walsh tells me. "This is potentially the end. There are no antibiotics in the pipeline that have activity against NDM 1-producing enterobacteriaceae. We have a bleak window of maybe 10 years, where we are going to have to use the antibiotics we have very wisely, but also grapple with the reality that we have nothing to treat these infections with."

And this is the optimistic view – based on the assumption that drug companies can and will get moving on discovering new antibiotics to throw at the bacterial enemy. Since the 1990s, when pharma found itself twisting and turning down blind alleys, it has not shown a great deal of enthusiasm for difficult antibiotic research. And besides, because, unlike with heart medicines, people take the drugs for a week rather than life, and because resistance means the drugs become useless after a while, there is just not much money in it.

Dr Livermore, whose grandmother died for lack of infection-killing drugs in 1945, is director of the antibiotic resistance monitoring and reference laboratory of the Health Protection Agency. Last year, the HPA put out an alert to medical professionals about NDM 1, urging them to report all suspect cases. Livermore is far from sanguine about the future.

"A lot of modern medicine would become impossible if we lost our ability to treat infections," he says.

Antibiotics are vital to abdominal surgery. "You safeguard the patient from bacteria leaking into the body cavity," he says. "If you lose the ability to treat these infections, far more people would die of peritonitis." Appendix operations would carry the same risk as they did before Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928.

Studies have shown, he says, that the chances of dying from hospital pneumonia or septicaemia (blood poisoning) are twice as high if the bacteria are drug-resistant, rising in the case of pneumonia from 20-30% to 40-60%.

"There probably is some need for public education about infection and, for instance, kitchen hygiene when you are cooking. People of my generation were taught a lot about washing your hands before every meal. It was automatic that it was done. A lot of that has gone."

• Removing a burst appendix becomes a dangerous operation once again.

• Pneumonia becomes once more "the old man's friend", particularly among the old and frail, who would lapse into unconsciousness and often slip away in their sleep.

[onlooker]

You know I used to live in NY city for many years and when I would see and pass the huge skyscrapers, I used to think how impressive we are as a species, to what lofty heights figuratively and literally we have reached. Well, now I see the total chaos, havoc and disarray the world and human civilization is in and I now have a diametrically opposed view. I see we are just one more frail species trying to finding our niche in Nature. Unfortunately, our hubris has not allowed us to be prudent in using our gifts. So now as this thread indicates with this health prognosis along with the other threats and actualities occurring even now, we are being taught the tough lesson that nothing in Nature is guaranteed except death, atrophy and decay.

[Tanada]

I predict that when the first child, probably a poor inner city kid, dies of antibiotic resistant Pertussis (whooping cough), it will set off a kind of alarm media firestorm like you have not yet seen in the USA. We like to believe childhood illnesses have been eliminated and are no longer a threat. It was only three generations ago, 75 years more or less, that a quarter of all children born in this country died before reaching adulthood from one disease or another.

The thing is, diseases like Pertussis that could be treated with antibiotics never had an effort put into immunization the same way the viral diseases like Small Pox and Rubella (German measles) did. The viral diseases got all the immunization work done precisely because they could not be treated with antibiotics that attack bacterial infections. The children who have been immunized will be safe from MMR (Mumps Measles and Rubella) and Varicella (chicken pox) and Polio, and even that rare bacteria that does have an immunization Scarlet Fever. But for all the other child hood bacterial diseases they will be defenseless, especially growing up in a culture that limits outdoor play and skinned knees as being too scary to contemplate.

Make no mistake, I do not want to see several million kids in this country catch bacterial diseases and die, but now that resistant bacteria have made it to our shores the time to develop vaccines is growing extremely short.

[onlooker]

"Make no mistake, I do not want to see several million kids in this country catch bacterial diseases and die, but now that resistant bacteria have made it to our shores the time to develop vaccines is growing extremely short." Yes, an elder people and sickly people also make up some of the vulnerable population. Combined with peak oil and lack of proper timely healthcare, good/balanced diet, medicine and we are looking at a pretty compelling case for premature die-off of the most vulnerable of society. All this seems to be coming up quite quickly upon society.

[evilgenius]

There is another vector for the spread of resistance, nursing and other care homes. Antibiotics are poured down the gullets of the elderly like candy. Doctors are required to sign-off on the use, but the drugs are generally given at the discretion of the help taking care of the people, and not after careful deliberation. Guess what, the drains connected to these facilities go to the same places everybody else's drains go. People visit too, though not as often as the elderly probably would like. The help go in and out of these places. If you think there isn't any reason for the top-line antibiotics to come into play in your community you are probably wrong. They are probably about as common as a bowl full of miniature candy bars at Halloween time, just behind a set of walls very close to you.

[vox_mundi]

Recent research uncovers surprises about antibiotic resistance

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '[')img]http://wi-images.condecdn.net/image/w2MwBO4E7RJ/crop/405[/img]

It's thought that antibiotic resistance is associated with a fitness cost, meaning that bacteria that develop antibiotic resistance must sacrifice something in order to do so. Because of this, proper use of antibiotics should result in susceptible strains eventually replacing resistant ones.

According to recent research, though, it appears that this paradigm might not be as solid as previously thought. In fact, antibiotic-resistant strains might also be fitter and more virulent, which may have profound impacts on the control and treatment of bacterial infections.

There was an ancient paradigm about the 'fitness cost of antibiotic resistance,' but the emergence of the new technologies of high-throughput sequencing has changed the field, allowing researchers to study bacterial pathogenesis at the genome scale," said Dr. David Skurnik, senior author of a new Bioessays article. "This new, unbiased approached has revealed that unfortunately the worst case scenario of antibiotic resistant bacteria being more fit and virulent was not uncommon, particularly during infection."

The situation complicates our fight against antibiotic resistance. "We need now, more than ever before, new antibacterial therapeutics to by-pass the infernal circle linked to antibiotic resistance that starts when an antibiotic is over-prescribed," Dr. Skurnik stressed.

Thomas Guillard et al, Antibiotic resistance and virulence: Understanding the link and its consequences for prophylaxis and therapy, BioEssays (2016).

[onlooker]

I am wondering if this information on this thread can be extrapolated to claim that this situation will make a world-wide Pandemic much more likely as more vulnerable sickly people will be around and also a particularly virulent bacteria can arise from all this dramatic evolution in resistant bacteria that can be the ONE to initiate a Pandemic?