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Healthy

Common Cold

Stomach aches

Mild influenza

Food poisoning

Influenza

Dysentery

Influenza whilst immune compromised

Ebola

Spanish flu

[Loud Whispers]

The world is on the cusp of a "post-antibiotic era", scientists have warned after finding bacteria resistant to drugs used when all other treatments have failed.
They identified bacteria able to shrug off the drug of last resort - colistin - in patients and livestock in China.
They said that resistance would spread around the world and raised the spectre of untreatable infections.
It is likely resistance emerged after colistin was overused in farm animals.
Bacteria becoming completely resistant to treatment - also known as the antibiotic apocalypse - could plunge medicine back into the dark ages.

Well, maybe not the dark ages, but certainly back a hundred years. Now is the time to look at cures of the last century?

[Graknorke]

This is why you're meant to finish your course of antibiotics chucklefucks.

[Jopax]

I picked dysntery because this is an utterly shit situation. Also as stated above, when idiots who aren't educated properly are given power to potentially fuck up things down the line, I swear, it's happened so many times before you'd think we'd learn something by now.

In any case, my immune system is pretty good at keeping me away from most things (can't remember when I had to take any antibiotics, highschool maybe? even then it was a one time thing for acne iirc) but I know some people who do have issues so it is rather worrying. Hopefully the genophage thing gains some traction, and is kept out of the hands of idiots this time around.

[i2amroy]

Just because bacteria become immune to all current known antibiotics doesn't necessarily mean they will be immune to future ones. This is the same arms race that has gone on for centuries; bacteria evolving resistances and their targets evolving defenses. The fact that we became complacent enough to end up on the "losing" end soon is horrible, but it doesn't mean an end-all-be-all loss.

[Egan_BW]

I'm sure it will be fine.

[andrea]

phage theray is a nice field of medicine that has been neglected. I am happy to see that interest is growing.

The reasons for that, however, are alarming. phage or not phage, an antbioticless world would not be nice. Quite terrible in fact, if widespread resistance comes before developement of substitutes.

pre-edit: @i2amroy it is not just that. From what I heard, it is also getting harder to find substances which can effectively work as antibiotics(kill bacteria, but no/little side effects to human host). But I don't have a reference for that.

[TempAcc]

If the bacteria spreads faster then we can develop and spread a new solution, things can get pretty grim, specially around rural and less developed areas, meaning the poorest layers of population will be at great risk.

[Sergarr]

claims of anti-biotic-less world are greatly exaggerated

also I find it ironic that Russia (along with over post-Soviet states) is apparently so backwards in medicine that it's actually on the forefront

dem integer overflows man

[andrea]

oh, nice. new antibiotic, resistant to resistance. Will take a while to bring it to market, but the antibiotic emergency is not exploding yet, so it should arrive in time. And potentially open up a whole new class. That hasn't happened in a while.

Still, we came close ( and maybe still are? will be clearer when this new molecule is widely used). An alternative is always nice. ( even better if it doesn't attack all the bacteria naturally living with us).

Also, while phage therapy is older than antibiotics, I wouldn't call using it backward. During the cold war it got developed too. It has disadvantages compared to antibiotics, but also some advantages.

[Harry Baldman]

Teixobactin works on Gr+ bacteria, though, while colistin's for Gr-. So that doesn't exactly help in the immediate sense. Though admittedly teixobactin also targets a novel mechanism if I recall correctly, so there may be interesting insights to be had there.

Not that we're unlikely to discover more and more antibiotics over time. It's just that finding, isolating and culturing the organisms that produce them is becoming an increasingly great challenge (for instance, teixobactin was obtained by culturing soil bacteria on growth chips in a very arcane manner). However, as we delve into increasingly obscure organisms, the possibility of bacteria having resistance to their natural antibiotics also markedly decreases, just like with teixobactin's buried nature making it suited to killing things that don't share its natural environment.

Phage therapy sounds cool, though.

[Bouchart]

if all else fails use fire

[scrdest]

claims of anti-biotic-less world are greatly exaggerated

That's more than just a new antibiotic with low resistance. It's one of the discoveries enabled by us starting to plumb the depths of an incredibly more vast field of potential findings - until very recently, we could only study a hilariously tiny slice (1%-ish) of the world of microorganisms - namely, those we could actually cultivate in labs.

Teixobactin, and a bunch of other compounds, meanwhile, were developed using a new generation of methods that allow us to study organisms that *wouldn't* work in a traditional lab setup - in this case, the bacteria were grown in the soil they would normally occupy, with some tricks.

The whole shebang with gut bacteria and obesity you might've heard of sprung from the same kind of next-gen methodology, incidentally.

[Neonivek]

I heard about this years ago, goodness it is taking a while.

Weren't we also nearing a Post-pesticide world too that would plunge the world into a food crisis?

[TempAcc]

if all else fails use fire

Thats kind of what Italy did during the black plague. The reason Italy (supposedly) had a comparatively low number of infections and deaths was probably due to the fact people set the plague victims (sometimes while still alive) and everything physically associated with them on fire until nothing but ashes remained :v

[andrea]

if all else fails use fire

that works, but tests have shown that it causes damage to the patient, up to and inclunding death.


@neonivek : if you are expecting a world where no antibiotic works and every small infection is immune to everything... that is a long way off, even if we stopped developig antibiotics now.
the problem is that immunity is increasing and some strands of some illnesses don't respond to antibiotics, or only respond to some which have heavy collateral effects. The first years of the "antibiotic apocalypse"( called as such for emphasis and alliteration) would "merely" be occasional outbreaks of a specific illness, on which antibiotics don't work well. then, outbreaks get larger and the strains involved increase. It is a gradual thing, or so I understand at least.