{"id":96957,"date":"2016-10-19T10:18:00","date_gmt":"2016-10-19T14:18:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/countingpips.com\/?p=96957"},"modified":"2016-10-19T07:18:28","modified_gmt":"2016-10-19T11:18:28","slug":"superbugs-how-antibiotic-resistant-bugs-are-killing-mankind","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/forex\/2016\/10\/superbugs-how-antibiotic-resistant-bugs-are-killing-mankind\/","title":{"rendered":"Superbugs: How Antibiotic-Resistant Bugs Are Killing Mankind"},"content":{"rendered":"
October 19, 2016<\/div>
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By WallStreetDaily.com<\/u><\/a> \"Superbugs:<\/p>\n

Forget ISIS, Obama, Trump, Clinton, and the Kardashians. Set aside even cancer, diabetes, and traffic accidents. The No. 1 threat to civilization might very well be good old bacteria.<\/strong><\/i><\/p>\n

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At the conclusion of his December 11, 1945, Nobel Lecture, Sir Alexander Fleming hypothesized about an \u201cignorant man\u201d giving himself \u201cnot enough to kill the streptococci but enough to educate them to resist penicillin.\u201d<\/p>\n

The man who shared the 1945 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Ernst Boris Chain and Sir Howard Walter Florey \u201cfor the discovery of penicillin and its curative effect in various infectious diseases\u201d warned of what we now refer to as \u201cantimicrobial resistance\u201d (AMR).<\/p>\n

Random changes in organisms\u2019 DNA can have no effect, they can be helpful, and they can be harmful. How you describe such effects is all a matter of perspective.<\/p>\n

Take bacteria. Here, courtesy of BoingBoing<\/strong><\/a> and Harvard Medical School, you can \u201cwatch bacteria become resistant to antibiotics in a matter of days.\u201d<\/p>

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That\u2019s good for the bacteria. But at the very best, that\u2019s neutral for us humans. And it may indeed signal something really, really bad.<\/p>\n

The Harvard Medical School video is titled \u201cThe Evolution of Bacteria on a \u2018Mega-Plate\u2019 Petri Dish.\u201d This mega-plate petri dish measures two feet by four feet.<\/p>\n

Random changes in organisms\u2019 DNA can have no effect, they can be helpful, and they can be harmful. How you describe such effects is all a matter of perspective.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Researchers divided the petri dish into nine bands and lined the base of it with normal levels of agar. The background is black, while the bacteria \u2014 Escherichia coli, or E. coli<\/em> \u2014 are white.<\/p>\n

In the two outside bands, the researchers put no antibiotic. In the next two bands, \u201cthere\u2019s barely more than E. coli<\/em> can survive,\u201d with a value of one for purposes of the experiment.<\/p>\n

The next two bands contained 10 times as much, the next two after that 100 times as much. The center band contained 1,000 times as much antibiotic as E. coli<\/em> can survive.<\/p>\n

After 11 days, the bacteria penetrated and dominated the center band.<\/p>\n

The experiment illustrates \u201cthe process of accumulating successive mutations\u201d that allows the bacteria \u201cnormally sensitive to an antibiotic\u201d to \u201cevolve resistance to extremely high concentrations in a short period of time.\u201d<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve been using antibiotics and similar drugs \u2014 collectively known as \u201cantimicrobial agents\u201d \u2014 for more than seven decades. Such drugs are used to treat patients who have infectious diseases.<\/p>\n

But their use has proliferated to an extent that we\u2019re now confronting a novel challenge: AMR.<\/p>\n

According to an October 2015 study published by the journal PLoS Biology<\/em>, \u201cAntibiotics are commonly used in animal husbandry, beekeeping, fish-farming and other forms of aquaculture, ethanol production, horticulture, anti-fouling paints, food preservation, and domestically. This provides multiple opportunities for the selection and spread of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.\u201d<\/p>\n

These are what are commonly referred to now as \u201csuperbugs.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dame Sally Davies, currently Chief Medical Officer for England and formerly a professor with the London School of Medicine, framed the problem during a September 23, 2016, conversation with William Karesh of the Council on Foreign Relations:<\/p>\n

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We misuse antibiotics everywhere.<\/p>\n

So over 50% of antibiotics worldwide are used in animals and agriculture, including fish farming, actually. In the States, about 80% of your antibiotics are used in animal production. They\u2019re used for growth promotion and in well animals. So they\u2019re actually substituting for good hygiene and sanitation. And as a result, infections \u2014 drug-resistant infections \u2014 are more prevalent in the States. My working assumption is that your waste disposal is effective, your sewage is effective. But if you go to big farms in China, where they also use antibiotics for growth promotion, the runoff from those farms is full of antibiotics because when animals, including the human animal, eat antibiotics and\/or take them, we excrete 70% to 80% of the antibiotics as they are. The rest is residue. So it goes straight into the environment, unless you\u2019ve got good waste management.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, \u201cat least 2 million people per year in the United States become infected with bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics, and at least 23,000 people die as a direct result of these infections.\u201d<\/p>\n

These are what are commonly referred to now as \u201csuperbugs.\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Worldwide, the number is more than 700,000. By 2050, we could be looking at 10 million AMR-related deaths per year.<\/p>\n

For reference\u2019s sake, cancer kills about 8.2 million worldwide annually.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re doing fantastic things in medical science and biotechnology these days \u2014 immunotherapy holds significant cancer-cure promise, gene editing could help us solve Alzheimer\u2019s, robotic surgery will make operations less invasive and more precise, we\u2019re helping quadriplegics \u201cfeel\u201d things via neural implants.<\/p>\n

But we\u2019ve fallen behind on some of the basics.<\/p>\n

One problem is that the market for antibiotics just isn\u2019t very lucrative. There\u2019s much more money in cancer drugs, for example, or diabetes and hypertension drugs, which have small margins but generate profits over the long haul because patients use them for life.<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s where pharmaceutical companies\u2019 research and development dollars are going.<\/p>\n

We can treat cancer, but a cancer patient might, along the way, develop an infection for which there is no antibiotic. So they survive the cancer but die from the infection.<\/p>\n

Vaccination \u2014 which is just a way to stimulate the body\u2019s natural immune response in order to fight infection \u2014 is another alternative to widespread human use of antibiotics.<\/p>\n

Right now, the problem is a lack of access to antibiotics, rather than resistance of bacteria to antibiotics.<\/p>\n

But that could change. And it will<\/em> change we continue to prescribe antibiotics without a diagnosis supporting that prescription. Persistent overuse in agriculture is also a significant problem.<\/p>\n

Government entities can wave the flag for \u201cnew antibiotics and better diagnostics and better ways of surveillance,\u201d as Dame Sally Davies put it.<\/p>\n

At the same time, \u201cIt\u2019s not in our hands to impact the veterinary use or the fish-farm use. It\u2019s not in our hands to do more than to comment and advise on the environmental contamination.\u201d<\/p>\n

We can treat cancer, but a cancer patient might, along the way, develop an infection for which there is no antibiotic. So they survive the cancer but die from the infection.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Innovation is now getting a jump-start in the AMR race.<\/p>\n

France-based Eligo Bioscience recently secured 2 million euros from Seventure Partners to fund research into a potential CRISPR-based solution to the AMR problem.<\/p>\n

And Iterum Therapeutics will use $40 million in Series A funding to launch an antibiotic licensed from another, unnamed company.<\/p>\n

Iterum was founded by former executives of Durata, the subject of a November 2014 $675 million buyout by Actavis, which itself was subsequently acquired by Allergan.<\/p>\n

Durata\u2019s antibiotic Dalvance is used to treat adults with skin infections.<\/p>\n

Heavyweights are also making their presence felt, as Allergan Plc<\/strong> (AGN), AstraZeneca Plc<\/strong> (AZN), GlaxoSmithKline Plc<\/strong> (GSK), Johnson & Johnson<\/strong> (JNJ), Merck & Co. Inc.<\/strong> (MRK), Novartis AG<\/strong> (NVS), Pfizer Inc.<\/strong> (PFE), and Sanofi SA<\/strong> (SNY) are among the \u201csignatory companies\u201d to a \u201croadmap to combat antimicrobial resistance\u201d announced September 20, 2016.<\/p>\n

Mutations \u2014 the \u201craw materials of evolution\u201d \u2014 are what made us. But mutations may, ultimately, be the death of us, too.<\/p>\n

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NBNBC<\/h2>\n

A group of undergraduate students at Stanford University\u2019s Chemistry, Engineering & Medicine for Human Health institute (ChEM-H) are working on \u201cnovel antibiotics from scratch that might one day stand up to superbugs.\u201d<\/p>\n

The students are focusing on two bacteria with high mortality rates that are resistant to nearly all antibiotics, Pseudomonas aeruginosa <\/em>and Acinetobacter baumannii<\/em>. Their plan has already attracted a $10,000 grant from the ChEM-H institute.<\/p>\n

Filsinger Interrante, one of the students, told Stanford News, \u201cWe believe that these diseases are so bad that if we develop something that actually works, doctors will use it and hospitals will want to have it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Smart Investing,<\/p>\n

David Dittman
\nEditorial Director, Wall Street Daily<\/i><\/p>\n

The post Superbugs: How Antibiotic-Resistant Bugs Are Killing Mankind<\/a> appeared first on Wall Street Daily<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By WallStreetDaily.com Forget ISIS, Obama, Trump, Clinton, and the Kardashians. Set aside even cancer, diabetes, and traffic accidents. The No. 1 threat to civilization might very well be good old bacteria. At the conclusion of his December 11, 1945, Nobel Lecture, Sir Alexander Fleming hypothesized about an \u201cignorant man\u201d giving himself \u201cnot enough to kill […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-96957","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","no-post-thumbnail"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/forex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96957","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/forex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/forex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/forex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/forex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=96957"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/forex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96957\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":96968,"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/forex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96957\/revisions\/96968"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/forex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=96957"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/forex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=96957"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/forex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=96957"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}