Total Antibiotic Resistant E.Coli Strain Reaches United States

Well that was a (flawed but) good run.
RIP humanity.
Press F to pay respects.

It's a bit like poker. You have a good run, and then you gamble everything with all your chips in and get the card you wanted least. Then you try it all over again to get the same highs, but you just get the same lows.

My bad I skimmed it since I understood the main idea. Didn't read main article because I don't give out clicks like that.

Come on guys no need to throw in the towel. Picture this
Marx had a point about the contradictions, a society with buyers and sellers working against each other is doomed to fail on its own.

Fug :D

Just disinfect your spinach very well, you´ll be fine.

We still have a huge amount of knowledge between then and now though.

It's like everyone on this thread forgot that humans adapt too.

Didn't they come up with some mechanism for generating new antibiotics from different dirt a few years back? What happened to that?

Bacteria tends to adapt pretty fucking fast.

Bacteria adapts fast, but we're aware of what it's doing and can make attempts to intervene. We can also start working on other forms of research to counteract them in new ways. Maybe the next piece of medical technology will be custom-engineered viruses that selectively target infectious bacteria.

This hasn't even exploded yet. It's a few small and relatively isolated cases where we've finally found that there are bacteria which, collectively, are resistant to all anti-biotics, but no individual bug is resistant to them all yet. We can make attempts to prevent that from happening through judicious quarantine to buy us time.

What's going to happen when enough bacteria resist the drugs we've always relied on? Come up with approximations? Well what if our knowledge on how bacteria suddenly doesn't apply anymore because it's adapted beyond what we've been able to predict it to do because it's adapted outside our models and tests and everything we take for granted every year.

You always prepare for the worst possible situation with outbreaks so you're prepared for the worst possible situation of an outbreak. That's how conversations about drug resistance works. It's not fatalism as much as it is putting cards on the table about what we know.

We may be smart, but life doesn't care.

Thanks, India.

To be fair, it hit Europe before it arrived here.

Fuck, I told you all about antibiotic resistance in the meat industry! Now we're all gonna die.

GOOD LUCK, ECOLI-CHAN!

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Fuck I saw this on Twitter and didn't even see the date.

My bad everyone can go home we're fine.

Then we should have made something new to counteract them, I already said that. This is the loudest warning bell so far that we need to start changing again or perish. There are new and more avenues of medical research available to us now than there were 30 years ago.
Our knowledge of bacteria won't simply vanish when they become drug resistant. They aren't doing billions of years worth of adaptations in a few years, they've just gone through natural selection of bacteria that can survive the extremely strong genetic hurdle we've put them through for the last 60 years.

These bacteria were likely always there. It's just that now that we've killed off all the strains that weren't capable of surviving antibiotics, you're going to start getting infections where the entire infection is comprised entirely of drug resistant bacteria.

Well, we do have a few potential options in the works, but most of them aren't the kind that are going to be the revolutionary problem solvers like the original antibiotics were in their days.

We can continue the course with how we currently deal with antibiotic resistance , which is to say we alter the chemical structure of the antibiotic in question just slightly enough that the drug still has anti-microbial properties but bypasses the resistance mechanisms that the microorganism in question has developed against the original compound. This works to a point, but you run the problem that there are really only a finite number of modifications that you can make to the drug in question before it loses its function. On top of this, generally the smaller the change that is made, the less time it takes for the bacteria in question to develop resistance, thus usually only truly novel changes to the antibiotic structure will yield long-term viability. In addition, while generally most bacteria will periodically lose resistance genes over time if they are not selected for, at the population level once the gene has been introduced, it will take less time after each subsequent antibiotic exposure for a surviving population of resistant bacteria to emerge and proliferate. Basically once resistance genes emerge, their prevalence in those bacterial populations begin to snowball.

There are a number of methods available to disinfect/sterilize many environmental surfaces of most/all potential pathogens, but they are not usually cheap enough to put into use outside of at-risk areas (hospitals, labs, etc). I can imagine food becomes even more difficult to disinfect meaningfully as well without potentially leaving toxic residue on the food, or at least changing its taste (though I am not a food microbiologist, so that's not really my area of expertise). Once the bacterial pathogen in question is in the body, such methods are of no value for treatment.

What you are referring to is phage therapy, and I've had the pleasure of speaking to some people who have been involved in research on the matter in the past. Basically what you have there is a situation where such methods can prove very useful (albeit sometimes a bit more costly than alternatives) for treating environmental contamination for a specific bacteria. However, use of phage therapy in humans runs into the problem that it can generally only be used once; as soon as the virus enters the body and begins to replicate through the targeted destruction of the bacteria, the immune system begins mounting an immune response (specifically generating antibodies) against the virus. That means that any subsequent attempt to use the phage to treat a relapse or future bacterial infection of that type will be SIGNIFICANTLY less effective to the point of being unsuitable as a medical treatment. You would have to entirely reconfigure the surface antigen composition of the virus before it could be use therapeutically again, which will take a lot of time and money while being essentially fine-tuned to be viable in a previously treated individual (or small patient population) alone.

The problems not that this has exploded, it's that it's about to explode and we needed to have alternatives prepared yesterday.

These things aren't Spanish Flu or the plague. Their the type of pathogens nestle their way into a population and cause chronic but mild (and virtually untreatable) outbreaks, or at the very least lead to upsurges in nosocomial infections that claim the lives of thousands of thousands of patients previously unassociated to the pathogen and make people even more leery of seeking medical treatment in general.

Good points.

No, Muke told us before you were a tripfag, it was like his 15th video.

Not a big deal, the basic pattern of human civilization is

Now, there are experimental antibiotics currently in research, they can kill bacteria not by the biochemistry, like interfering some ion channels of the cells, but physically.

Antibiotics 'seen using brute force to kill bugs'
bbc.com/news/health-38857266

Antibiotic resistance: Superbugs can be killed by modifying existing drugs, scientists discover
independent.co.uk/news/science/superbugs-kill-cured-existing-drugs-antibiotic-resistance-new-way-scientists-ucl-a7561686.html

That's not tripping. But fine, I just thought it was funny… Anyway, Muke isn't here and I am.

yeah, sure, namefag, whatever.

Thank China, not India. China is the one that took our most powerful antibiotic and used it to treat pigs… FUCKING PIGS! That's where it gained it's resistance.

I think you might well be wrong about the expense of reconfiguring the antigen composition of bacteriophages should this technology mature. Chemical Synthesis of Polio virus cDNA: Generation of Infectious Virus in the Absence of Natural Template outlines how to produce virus from an RNA strand fed to ribosomes. Given that everything, capsid included, is formed from that RNA strand, you only need to develop a wide library of proteins and refine the aforementioned process to cook up any bacteriophage you might like.

No, not really. Keeping some extra genes around specifically to resist anti-biotic compounds where they don't regularly run into them is an extra set of genes that wastes metabolic processes that could be used to outcompete another strain. Microogranism genomes are much more finely selected by evolution than more complex organisms' because they're generally simpler and they live and die quicker.

Can't believe the game is going to end with monarcho-ancaps having the high score.

Boy, I sure am glad that farmers have free reign to fill their livestock up with antibiotics, acting a breeding grounds for antibiotic resistant bacteria.
It may have doomed countless millions to a horrifying death, but at-least their economic freedom was preserved.
Thank you free market!

I would be down for another round of cultural Danse Macabre, tbh fam.

Good thing we have genetic manipulation and engineering now, or we wouldn't stand a chance.
There is no way back, only forward.

Kulaks strike from the grave!

Wake me up when we get Black Plague 2.0

Pretty sure black plague didn't kill everyone who got infected otherwise Europe and west Asia would be a wasteland.

yup

So if there was an outbreak, how would we survive? Do you need full protection or will just being sufficiently paranoid with an NBC mask suffice?

hmmm..

Dude it's just E.Coli, it's not guaranteed fatal, yes you'll be miserable and popping Oxy like it's Pez, but your body will expel it eventually like any virus.

bacteria can share traits with other bacteria, but even if that doesn't happen, if e coli can become immune it stands to reason that more deadly bacteria could too

Google Necrotizing Fasciitis.

If you eat produce grown in manure tainted with the bacteria, you can get E. Coli. Nobody is safe.

An alternative to antibiotics has existed for well over half a century, phage therapy. It's generally cheaper, better, and current data suggests it won't have this a resistance buildup crisis like antibiotics are having. It was widely used in the Eastern Bloc but It's almost unheard of elsewhere. Take a fucking guess as to why Porky has pretty much stonewalled this in both the pharmaceutical industry and the media.

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Let's not pretend capitalism is this brittle.

Thanks, carnists.

From now on, i'm only drinking alcoholic beverages. Because bacterias.

Humans deserved it

underrated post

Pandora's box has already been opened, the only way out is through.