What's the deal with antibiotics?

China fed all our best ones to livestock and bred a superplague we can't cure, probs gonna b fine though lmao

>>8514243
Antibiotics provide an evolutionary selective pressure that results in more resistant microorganisms.

>>8514243
We should stop using them and save them for very serious illnesses, and get the public educated about how they DONT WORK on viral infections.

Since the cascade of new and more advanced antibiotics and further efforts to get better ones has been underway, we've noticed an improvement in the effect of the oldest antibiotics, Penicillin for example hasnt' been used widely since the late 80s and its starting to pay off.

If we reduce antibiotic use, they will become more effective because bacteria have limited ability to acquire resistance, if they're not being pressured by the antibiotics killing them, they will eventually lose resistance to it.

Phage therapy when?

>>8514915
Doctor-bro here

I have not been practicing medicine long, but even I can see the development of antimicrobial resistance since starting in medical school until now. Co-amoxiclav used to be like dettol, it'd kill most general infections. However, I see more and more frequently there are patients with infections that fail to respond to this antibiotic. Now we are on to piperacillin/tazobactam and it is looking light this might let us down in 5 years or so.

The problem is that doctors are lazy. We can diagnose infection pretty easily, but defining exactly where that infection is becomes more tricky. It's easier to give a broad-spectrum antibiotic that covers urine and chest infections (the most common sources). More targetted therapy would certainly help.

>>8514946
Very much this

antibiotics bring you back to life - House

>>8515192
I'm a junior undergrad focusing on microbiology. I was originally planning on going into virology but lately I've noticed bacteriology, especially antibiotic resistance, it seems like a stronger field just for that reason.

>>8514946
When FDA decides to approve them. The biggest hurdle is that FDA won't approve them because FDA refuses to approve drug cocktails which is how phages are administered due to their extreme specificity. There are fears of lysogenic viruses combining genetic material with the target. Until FDA approves them, large pharmaceutical companies won't move in to develop them because they are impossible to patent as multiple phages can target the same bacteria and breeding/discovering a new one is fairly easy and passing regulatory hurdles is not worth the investment right now. As a result, you have small start ups trying to develop phage therapy and get them approved and they have less funds and have more work with the FDA due to the lack of connections.

>>8514915
The biggest problem is that patients stop taking them once the symptoms disappear instead of taking them for the entire prescribed time period. Allowing the remaining more-resistant microorganisms to survive, reproduce and evolve further resistances until they become completely resistant at some point.

Doctors need to be clear about this and explain to the patients why they have to keep using them all the way to the end of the treatment period.