“A post-antibiotic era means, in effect, an end to modern medicine as we know it. Things as common as strep throat or a child’s scratched knee could once again kill.” – Dr. Margaret Chan, Director General of the World Health Organization, 2012 The number of new antibacterial agents developed each year has consistently fallen from 16 new agents a year in 1983-1987 to only 6 in 2007. The major drivers of antimicrobial resistance are not only the over prescription and misuse of antibiotics in the clinical setting, but even more so the use of antibiotics in US agriculture. In 2011, of the 17 million kilograms of antibiotics produced in the US, 13.7 million kilograms - 81% of all antibiotics produced in the US - were used in food-producing animals in agriculture. Only 3.3 million kilograms were used in humans. The discovery of a new antibiotic agent that has no current resistance mechanisms in Staphylococcus aureus or Mycobacterium tuberculosis is huge news. For the sake of humanity, I hope we continue to have breakthroughs using new and innovative methods to isolate antimicrobial compounds from previously uncultured bacterial species, as the researchers in this Nature article did. If you (like me) do not have access to the technology to discover new antibiotics yourself, try choosing to purchase animal products that were not produced with antibiotics in the feed. Maybe you wont end up on a vent in an ICU with pseudomonal pneumonia resistant to everything except marginal sensitivity to gentamicin.
Posted on: Sat, 10 Jan 2015 02:32:02 +0000
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