Posted on 12/01/2013 8:22:41 PM PST by JerseyanExile
After 85 years, antibiotics are growing impotent. So what will medicine, agriculture and everyday life look like if we lose these drugs entirely?
A few years ago, I started looking online to fill in chapters of my family history that no one had ever spoken of. I registered on Ancestry.com, plugged in the little I knew, and soon was found by a cousin whom I had not known existed, the granddaughter of my grandfather’s older sister. We started exchanging documents. After a few months, she sent me something disturbing.
It was a black-and-white scan of an article clipped from the long-gone Argus of Rockaway Beach, New York.The article was about my great-uncle Joe, the youngest brother of my cousin’s grandmother and my grandfather. In a family that never talked much about the past, he had been discussed even less than the rest. I knew he had been a fireman in New York City and died young, and that his death scarred his family with a grief they never recovered from.
I had always heard Joe had been injured at work: not burned, but bruised and cut when a heavy brass hose nozzle fell on him. The article revealed what happened next. Through one of the scrapes, an infection set in. After a few days, he developed an ache in one shoulder; two days later, a fever. His wife and the neighborhood doctor struggled for two weeks to take care of him, then flagged down a taxi and drove him fifteen miles to the hospital in my grandparents’ town. He was there one more week, shaking with chills and muttering through hallucinations, and then sinking into a coma as his organs failed. Nothing worked. He was thirty when he died, in March 1938.
(Excerpt) Read more at thefern.org ...
and ???
You don’t really need to go very far back to find the life in which a simple disease or just an infected scratch might kill you.
Not far at all.
The date is important. 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.
Predictions that we might sacrifice the antibiotic miracle have been around almost as long as the drugs themselves. Penicillin was first discovered in 1928 and battlefield casualties got the first non-experimental doses in 1943, quickly saving soldiers who had been close to death. But just two years later, the drug’s discoverer Sir Alexander Fleming warned that its benefit might not last. Accepting the 1945 Nobel Prize in Medicine, he said:
“It is not difficult to make microbes resistant to penicillin in the laboratory by exposing them to concentrations not sufficient to kill them… There is the danger that the ignorant man may easily underdose himself and by exposing his microbes to non-lethal quantities of the drug make them resistant.”
Medium magazine? As in what? psychic medium?
Whatever.
No antibiotics will be the least of worries as this gimme culture takes root in demanding our medical community to work for free (not to be confused with charity, working for those who cannot) and we’re left with no medical care at all.
Besides, antibiotics should not have bee being used routinely.
Everyone knew that.
A weak perpetually pharmaceutical dependent population.
Before ~1940 there were no antibiotics.
Read up on the death of President Garfield. It took him a long time to die of the infection that most think the doctors gave him.
Bring on the nano technology
The immunity of various diseases to antibiotics will be the death knell of the sexual revolution.
When going insane and dying of syphilis becomes the penalty immorality again you’ll see a change in behavior.
Such deaths were quite common before 1940. My uncle was working at a shop for Missouri Pacific in 1930. A tool slipped and he got a bad cut on the hand. They took him to the company doctor, who cleaned it up and stitched it uo. Carelessly as it turned out. Two weeks late my uncle was dead of an infection. He left behind a pregnant wife and a five year old son, and a little insurance but no income. My aunt, my Dad said, had always had a sweet disposition. Not when I knew her.
Nano plastic polymers, charged to match the surface of the offending cells, act like a magic bullet.... is one new approach that seems to offer great promise......
IBM discovery .. http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/34144.wss
Brave new world!
The biggest culprit seems to be agribusiness which uses 80% of all antibiotics and have developed resistant bugs in the animals.
Yes, because prostitution didn’t exist prior to 1943.
Sigh. You don’t know how that sounds hopeful.
Something has to fix it. I wish it were, as God planned it, through the wisdom and actions of women.
It’s against natural law, the way it’s been going.
Yes, the new synthetic biology give us hope. But will it arrive in time? And might not some devil get ahold of something invented by this new technology and use it as a weapon?
Bacteria aren’t bullet proof, at least no more than we are. New antibiotics are possible and with scientific advances should be designable instead of counting on chance to find them as with the first generations. The problem is government and crony capitalism monopolies have been allowed to foul up their pricing. Plus government regulations aimed at ‘reducing risk’ have made them too expensive to develop. ‘Fix’ government (in the same sense as ‘fixing’ one’s cat) and useful products like new antibiotics will appear.
A “medium” in this case is basically the delivery system, liquid, dry or whatever transfer modem would be…cream?
Are you really that ignorant of basic biology?
It didn’t stop people in the past. Read a little history. It won’t stop them in the future.
Hmm.
Okay.
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