[gego]

Antibiotics have been in use for less than a century. During that time their use has caused resistant strains of bacteria to develop. The process is that with sufficient use, eventually not all bacteria are eliminated by the current antibiotic so as it is used, it kills all non resistant strains, but leaves the resistant strains alive to reproduce. Then a new drug is developed, but the process continues so that now, the bacteria we deal with are not the same as they were before we started this snowball rolling.

During that same time frame, humans have been reproducing and those who would not have survived without antibiotics have had the opportunity to reproduce.

So entering the post peak world, we have a population "weakened" from the lack of "selection" and at the same time have very different bacteria with which to contend. Bacteria and humans have been taking different paths so to speak, so what will happen should antibiotics not be available in post peak times, and these "new" humans and "new" bacteria must again establish a balance?

Somehow I think that bacterial infection will be a much bigger problem to humans than it was before anyone heard of antibiotics.

[Kylon]

Infectious diseases will be a problem. Perhaps you should grow a garden of Eccinachea,

Or perhaps you should find a more potent antibiotic, one that has incredibly great strength, that's extremely toxic to both bacteria and humans alike, and simply combined it with a trophic factor of some sort.

If you could find a strong enough trophic factor to combined with an antibiotic, you could neutralize much of the toxicity by increasing your bodies own regenerative/stress tolerance abilities.

Then whatever infection you got, would disappear, while you would remain unharmed.

Also, don't worry about immunity to pencillin, what will happen in the future, is as pencillin becomes unavailable to the masses, the bacteria will start to lose their resistance rather quickly. Once it loses it's resistance, you can begin to use it again.

I just did some reading in Wikipedia, about antibiotics, and bacteriophages may hold the solution to the problem of both

A) Resistance build up of bacteria to antibiotics

B) Cost/lack of antibiotics post-peak

Bacteriophages (viruses that target bacteria) adapt with the bacteria, so as bacteria changes so does the bacteriophage. Bacteriophages also pretty much only target certain families, species, or sub-species of bacteria, so it shouldn't bother your immune system that much.

It should be easy to produce as well.

Simply take the bacteriophage in one container, grow whatever bacteria that bacteriophage targets, then put some of the bacteria grown in a third container, and take some of the bacteriophage and put it in the third container.

It's food is the bacteria, so then you end up with a bunch of new bacteriophage, grown, ready for use, capable of being used to fight off the infection.

In order to make a widespectrum (but less effective) treatment against bacteria and the likes, one would simply combined multiple bacteriophages together for a treatment.

So as long as you can grow whatever bacteria your trying to protect yourself from, you should be able to produce the bacteriophages to protect yourself from that kind of bacteria or fungus(fungophages) and as long as you can get your hands on the bacteriophage in the first place to do that.

[Schneider]

yeah..it remember me a old documentary about bacteriophages ! I think we should ,as peakoilers,learn a lot more about them..

They seem to be the all around weapon we need again bacterias ..

Thx to remembering me about them !

Schneider
French-Canadian