Monday, September 22, 2014

Doctors enlisted to turn the tide on antibiotic resistance (for Alexandra Smith)

Antibiotic resistance

What is it?
Now that we are using antibiotics for everything, the viruses are adapting to the medicine that we are using to get rid of them. This means that some of the antibiotics are no longer effective or are not working as well as they use to because the bacteria is getting used to it. Some microbes are changing faster than antimicrobials can kill them. As a result, it’s once again possible to get an infection for which there is no sure cure. This is called antibiotic resistance, another way of explaining this phenomenon is that antibiotic resistance occurs when an antibiotic has lost its ability to effectively control or kill bacterial growth; in other words, the bacteria are "resistant" and continue to multiply in the presence of therapeutic levels of an antibiotic.

One cause of antibiotic resistance is the fact that farmers are giving their animals a bunch of this and that we are after consuming all of it.

Are you ready for a world without antibiotics?

Antibiotics are a bedrock of modern medicine. But in the very near future, we're going to have to learn to live without them once again. And it's going to get nasty. If we really lost antibiotics to advancing drug resistance — and trust me, we’re not that far away — here’s what we would lose. Not just the ability to treat infectious disease; that’s obvious but also the ability to treat cancer, and to transplant organs. Any treatment that relies on a permanent port into the bloodstream for example kidney dialysis would no longer be safe at all. We would not be able to do any major open-cavity surgery, on the heart, the lungs and the abdomen.

We’d lose the ability to treat people after traumatic accidents, as major as crashing your car and as minor as your kid falling out of a tree. We’d lose the safety of modern childbirth: Before the antibiotic era, 5 women died out of every 1,000 who gave birth. One out of every nine skin infections killed. Three out of every 10 people who got pneumonia died from it and that’s where we are headed again.

And we’d lose, as well, a good portion of our cheap modern food supply. Most of the meat we eat in the industrialized world is raised with the routine use of antibiotics, to fatten livestock and protect them from the conditions in which the animals are raised. Without the drugs that keep livestock healthy in concentrated agriculture, we’d lose the ability to raise them that way. Either animals would sicken, or farmers would have to change their raising practices, spending more money when their margins are thin. Either way, meat, poultry, pork — and fish and seafood, also raised with abundant use of antibiotics— would become much more expensive.

Read the article here: 
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/doctors-enlisted-turn-tide-antibiotic-resistance 

Questions:
1) Are you ready for a world without antibiotics? Why do you think so or not so?

2) What else would antibiotic resistance affect?

11 comments:

  1. I don't think this generation is ready for a world with no antibiotics we think so what next week they will have a new cure or medicine but I really doubt it the medicines to fight bacteria, infections etc.

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  2. I don’t think the world is ready for a world without antibiotics because we would not be able to treat people who have bad diseases like cancer, we would not be able to treat people who recently had car accidents, and we would also lose some of our food supply. I know, we are not going to have antibiotics around forever, but I don’t think we would be able to get rid of them right now, only because we don’t have any other medicine to help us with the situation yet. Also, with antibiotics not being able to keep livestock healthy, that would bring down our food supply because all of our food would be unhealthy, and not a lot of people want to eat unhealthy food, right? I know I wouldn’t want to! People would probably die more often without the medicine and food that they need, so the world would be a dark place and not a very healthy place either.

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  3. I agree with Emily and Patricio because I don't think that the world is ready for a worl without antibiotics because if we don't have antibiotics anymore, a lot of people died because we wont be able to treat people because of cancer or infections.

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  4. I think that the world is not ready for a world without antibiotics. This is because there are many diseases in the world that have to be treated with antibiotics. Take the flu for an example, when you go to the doctor, they give you medicine to make it better, then you are better. Without that, it would take much longer to get over the flu, and the effects of it would just get worse. Although, there are some illnesses that don't have a cure yet. For example, there are some types of cancer that don't yet have a cure, and usually people die from them in result of that. But that's why they are working so hard around the world to find a cure for those cancers that don't yet have a cure.

    On the contrary, there are some people that think the world is ready for no antibiotics. These people are the ones that don't believe that you need antibiotics to cure a disease of illness, but just to do a natural technique of some sort.

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    1. Vince,

      I have to disagree with your comment on the cure for cancer. Even though there are a multitude of cancers they would only have one cure. There currently is no cure for cancer as I know it and there only remains survivors because the cancerous cells were completely removed by surgery, chemo, or radiaton. None of these are cures because relapses do occur and they can only help the person and are treatments because a cure would completely stopvthe disease while these treatments only help to remove the cancer.

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  5. I do not think that in this current day or age we are ready to handle a world where antibiotics are useless. Without antibiotics even a normal injury such as a semi large cut could prove to be fatal. Without any other means of curing disease or killing bacteria we would be susceptible to anything and would begin to die out.

    Having useless antibiotics would affect numerous things. To begin with, foodstuffs could be tainted with disease and many animals would die even before they would be full grown. Also, many diseases would become incurable, thus killing many more people and possibily throwing countries into anarchy because the officials are dying and there are major food shortages. Next, this could drive people into isolation and prove to make the world paranoid and hostile.To conclude, this is how I think having antibiotic resistant bacteria and diseases could effect society.

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  6. I think people won't be ready for this, we're used to a bunch of bad things, like not resting, bad alimentation, etc. That's why people in actuality gets sick more often. I think people will have to prepare to change a lot of this things the majority do. A balance diet, rest more, etc. So we don't need antibiotics (not all) in a future.

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    1. And I think I won't be ready for a world without antibiotics because I don't do all the things I recommend hehe, I will have to change things I do too.

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  7. I don't think this generation is ready for a world with no antibiotics we think that next week they will have a new cure or medicine but I really doubt it the medicines to fight bacteria, infections etc. It can get to take really long time to make especially antibiotics and all kind of medications need to pass to some series of tests to see how does the medicine reacts, etc.

    All kind of bacteria evolves and gets stronger against medicines and some times even the meds don't work any more.

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  8. this generation isn't ready for living without antibiotics because we do all stuff and we don't care like not having something hot when its cold, or eating without washing our hands before eating, besides there are new diseases and without any antibiotic we would get sick of it and even we could die

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  9. I do not think that todays generation could be able to coexits without antibiotics. Yes, we couldn’t be able to have meat but also we wouldn’t be able to adapt to what a world without antiobiotics would mean. Todays generation is build on advance technology and science such as the antibiotics used daily. The population would go down dramatically without anitibiotics to cure patients and to heal things as easily as a little cuts. Cuts would get infected and the bacteria anitibiotics stop would enter freely into someones blood system. I wouldn’t be able to have a world without antibiotics because my family would die, I would die, the whole world would probably die over a long period of time.

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