http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/john-robson-the-antibiotic-window-is-slamming-shut
Feel the burn! FOREVER :twisted:
Heres an end of the world news item: super-gonorrhea is overwhelming the last antibiotic defences in Britain, so apparently we need new antibiotics. Anything but chastity.
...
Two things are ominously true and relevant about this particular gonorrhea story. First is the emergence of antibiotic resistance in any number of diseases that attack you in any number of places. Since the Second World War, we have enjoyed blessed immunity from sudden death by bacterial infection that haunted humans since we first saw the city lights.
We have forgotten what it was like when the presidents son got a blister playing lawn tennis and died. (Calvin Coolidge Jr., age 16.) And it has contributed to our false sense, not just of security, but of omnipotence and impunity, as well.
It is not immediately obvious why people who embraced the theory of evolution so eagerly expected bacteria not to evolve. But we did.
Hence, second, when people cant ignore the emerging evidence, they call for more of the same: better drugs, more careful prescriptions, less routine agricultural overuse. Science will find a way so we dont have to change our ways.
When this newspaper reported briefly that Britains on high alert because the newest strain of the clap (a.k.a., Neisseria gonorrhoeae) doesnt respond to azithromycin, it cited the countrys chief medical officer warning doctors and pharmacies not to prescribe older antibiotics it is also resistant to. Meanwhile, a longer Washington Post story said that in 2013, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention called antibiotic-resistant gonorrhea an urgent threat, with about a third of cases resisting at least one antibiotic, so doctors should use ceftriaxone with azithromycin.
Fine if you want to breed gonorrhea resistant to both. As the Post noted, Bacteria are fast-evolving creatures with a creepy capacity to share genes. So its our use of antibiotics that really has to evolve.
Feel the burn! FOREVER :twisted:
