[ExI] The post-antibiotic era

BillK pharos at gmail.com
Wed Nov 20 19:39:13 UTC 2013


On Sun, Nov 17, 2013 at 10:49 PM, Anders Sandberg wrote:
> Yes, but that is because they do not have the big picture. They look at
> mortality rates and deaths around them, rather than mortality distributions
> and existential risk.
>
> From my ivory tower resistent bacteria are a stinking, nasty cesspit in the
> landscape, but not anything like the bioweaponry dragon in the synthbio
> mountains, the gleaming nuclear silos, or that dust cloud on the horizon
> that might be bad AI. Yes, per average year resistant bacteria is likely to
> kill more people than the weird threats I watch for, but they are not going
> to end humanity. They are just bad news like climate change.
>
>

The doctors so far are only seeing the first signs of the increased
death rate from antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
It is the future death rates they are worried about.

A new article describes what happens when operations become impossible
and every accident, large or small, that gets infected becomes fatal.

<http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/11/end-abx/>
Quote:
If we really lost antibiotics to advancing drug resistance — and trust
me, we’re not far off — 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,
because doing those successfully relies on suppressing the immune
system and willingly making ourselves vulnerable to infection. Any
treatment that relies on a permanent port into the bloodstream — for
instance, kidney dialysis. Any major open-cavity surgery, on the
heart, the lungs, the abdomen. Any surgery on a part of the body that
already harbors a population of bacteria: the guts, the bladder, the
genitals. Implantable devices: new hips, new knees, new heart valves.
Cosmetic plastic surgery. Liposuction. Tattoos.

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 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 — and fish and
seafood, also raised with abundant antibiotics in the fish farms of
Asia — would become much more expensive.

And it wouldn’t be just meat. Antibiotics are used in plant
agriculture as well, especially on fruit. Right now, a drug-resistant
version of the bacterial disease fire blight is attacking American
apple crops. There’s currently one drug left to fight it. And when
major crops are lost, the local farm economy goes too.
---------


The future effect will be many times more than the current 23,000
deaths per year (in USA).

It will be much worse for third world countries where there is more
infection and who will also be badly hit by food shortages and higher
food prices.

BillK




More information about the extropy-chat mailing list