Posted on 04/05/2011 11:05:59 AM PDT by neverdem
ON DECEMBER 11th 1945, at the end of his Nobel lecture, Alexander Fleming sounded a warning. Fleming’s chance observation of the antibiotic effects of a mould called Penicillium on one of his bacterial cultures had inspired his co-laureates, Howard Florey and Ernst Chain, two researchers based in Oxford, to extract the mould’s active principal and turn it into the miracle cure now known as penicillin. But Fleming could already see the future of antibiotic misuse. “There is the danger”, he said, “that the ignorant man may easily underdose himself and by exposing his microbes to non-lethal quantities of the drug make them resistant.”
Penicillin and the other antibiotics that its discovery prompted stand alongside vaccination as the greatest inventions of medical science. Yet Fleming’s warning has always haunted them. Antibiotic resistance has now become a costly and dangerous problem. Some people fear there may be worse to come: that a strain of resistant bacterium might start an epidemic for which no treatment was available. Yet despite Fleming’s warning and despite a fair understanding of the causes of resistance and how they could be dealt with, dealing with them has proved elusive. Convenience, laziness, perverse financial incentives and sheer bad luck have conspired to nullify almost every attempt to stop the emergence of resistance.
There are good reasons to hope that the extreme threat of a resistant epidemic will never come to pass—not least that 65 years of routine antibiotic use have failed to prompt one. Even so, the lesser problems of resistance continue to gnaw away at medicine, hurting people and diverting resources from more productive uses, often in the countries that can least afford it.
Convenience and laziness top the list of causes of antibiotic resistance. That is because those who misuse these drugs mostly do not pay the...
(Excerpt) Read more at economist.com ...
“non-issue” for who?
For me it was life-threatening.
I sent email to CDC (like that will do anything).
Will be sending letter to my congressional rep and see what happens.
I wish you all the best. I know first hand how devastating MRSA can be. My mother now has a titanium cage replacing two vertabrae and titanium rods fusing the two vertabrae above and below the cage. She actually died on the operating table a couple of times (two 8 hour surgeries 24 hrs apart). She got off the Vanco IV a couple of months ago now. And is making a good recovery but she is a spunky 73. It has taken a lot out of her though. I am sure you feel the same way.
Thank you.
Oh, and prayers to your mother.
Superbugs are a non-issue for doctors who are educated about phages.
Phages routinely and easily defeat superbugs that antibiotics can’t touch.
For doctors stuck in pre-1910 medicine (i.e. limited to antibiotics), superbugs are a big deal.
But...it’s just an educational issue, not a technical one.
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