Your Medicine Is Going To Stop Working: Welcome to the Post-Antibiotic Era

[marmar]

Your Medicine Is Going To Stop Working: Welcome to the Post-Antibiotic Era
Misuse and over-reliance on some of our most vital medicines is rendering them ineffective.

October 25, 2013
Willy Blackmore


What’s long been posed as a question of if and when has become a present reality, according to the associate director of the Centers for Disease Control. In an interview with PBS that ran earlier this week as part of push for the new Frontline documentary on drug-resistant bacteria, Dr. Arjun Srinivasan says we’ve arrived in the post-antibiotic era.

For a long time, there have been newspaper stories and covers of magazines that talked about "The end of antibiotics, question mark?" Well, now I would say you can change the title to "The end of antibiotics, period."

We're here. We're in the post-antibiotic era. There are patients for whom we have no therapy, and we are literally in a position of having a patient in a bed who has an infection, something that five years ago even we could have treated, but now we can't.

The lengthy interview focuses largely on the use—and abuse—of antibiotics in the human context, but America’s largest consumers of these drugs, livestock, are unwittingly contributing to this growing public health risk too.

“There have been a number of studies that show that when you give antibiotics to animals, especially to animals that we then eat, there are antibiotics that get into their systems that can develop resistance,” Dr. Srinivasan says, “and then when we eat the food, we can be exposed to those resistant organisms.”

Just this week industry watchdogs made their latest call for a ban on non-therapeutic use of antibiotics in animals raised for food. The oft-repeated recommendation was part of a report published by the John Hopkins Center for a Liveable Future, which also found that the influence of industrial ag and the pharmaceutical industry has on iron-grip on policy discussions—and wields outsized influence over academia and the government’s regulation and enforcement efforts. ..................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.takepart.com/article/2013/10/25/post-antibiotic-era

[Miranda4peace]

1. This will be an issue,fortunately some people are working on ways of countering bacterial resistance

In bacteria, multidrug-resistance pumps (MDRs) confer resistance to
chemically unrelated amphipathic toxins. A major challenge in developing effica-
cious antibiotics is identifying antimicrobial compounds that are not rapidly
pumped out of bacterial cells. The plant antimicrobial berberine, the active compo-
nent of the medicinal plants echinacea and golden seal, is a cation that is readily
extruded by bacterial MDRs, thereby rendering it relatively ineffective as a thera-
peutic agent. However, inhibition of MDR efflux causes a substantial increase in
berberine antimicrobial activity, suggesting that berberine and potentially many
other compounds could be more efficacious if an effective MDR pump inhibitor
could be identified. Here we show that covalently linking berberine to INF,55,an
inhibitor of Major Facilitator MDRs, results in a highly effective antimicrobial that
readily accumulates in bacteria. The hybrid molecule showed good efficacy in a
Caenorhabditis elegansmodel of enterococcal infection, curing worms of the
pathogen.
http://www.northeastern.edu/adc/publications/ACSChemBioBALL.pdf

Here is another excerpt/link about a compound that improves the effective of existing anti-biotics against Staph.

. The results show that baicalin possesses only a weak
antistaphylococcal effect (MICs ranging from 128–512 mg/L),
but its addition resulted in significant MIC reduction in
oxytetracycline and tetracycline. The combination of baicalin
and oxytetracycline showed the strongest synergistic effect
http://jac.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2011/03/17/jac.dkr108.full.pdf

[Thirties Child]

2. It looks like antibiotics came and went during my lifetime

I'm 78 and I remember life before antibiotics. I had an infection on my foot, with red lines running up my leg. The treatment was to soak an hour in Epson salts, an hour out, an hour in, etc. every day for a week.

My son had an infection, same red lines. The doctor gave him a shot of penicillin, told me to give him an antibiotic every four hours through the night. The next morning the red lines were gone. An amazing difference to what I went through.

I'm beginning to think a childhood in the 30s and 40s was in many ways healthier. No plastic, everything was natural, grass-fed beef (except for all the Spam during the war), eggs from free-range chickens, in fact chicken from free-range chickens. I remember the wonder of homogenized milk, and missed the way the cream at the top of the milk bottle froze on winter mornings. The mustard plasters weren't much fun, but they did the job. Plastics everywhere, no antibiotics, plus global warming? It's not going to be pretty.

[Holly_Hobby]

3. Hospital's stainless steel everything needs to be replaced with copper

and we've known this for thousands of years, that copper kills bacteria. That would help cut down on resistant bacteria.

http://thechart.blogs.cnn.com/2013/05/14/copper-in-hospital-rooms-may-stop-infections/|

We need a complete overhaul of our lifestyle and diet too. Mother Nature will win every time, what don't they understand about that?

( That screeching sound you hear is the sound of me putting away my soap box )