[ExI] The post-antibiotic era

[rex]

BillK <pharos at gmail.com> [2013-11-20 11:45]:
>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.

That's FUD. Normal immune systems constantly defeat infections, mostly
unnoticed. Those that reach the noticeable level are also usually
naturally defeated without resorting to antibiotics. Life expectancy
in 1st world countries increased markedly _before_ antibiotic use
became widespread. IOW, good public health practices are more important
than antibiotics are.

><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.

Sorry, I don't trust journalists. Marc Lappe wrote, _Germs That Won't
Die: The New Threat of Antibiotic Resistant Bacteria_ in -- wait for
it -- 1982. IOW, the threat is real and has been known for a long 
time, but it's not tomorrow's TEOTWAWKI.

>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.

This is counterfactual. Small amounts of antibiotics are commonly
added to animal feed in the US, not to "fatten" the animals and
protect them from disease, but to increase the growth rate. If the
practice were ended (which IMO it should be, yesterday), growth
rates would be only slightly lower and disease rates would remain
about the same because the amounts of antibiotics in feed are
subtherapeutic.

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

Only if "much more" means "a few percent more."

>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.

More FUD. At this point McKenna's credibility dropped to zero for me.
Fire blight is a problem to be sure, but it will not end apple
farming, much less destroy the farm economy. Why not? At least two
reasons: a) there are apple varieties (red delicious, winesap) that are
naturally resistant to fire blight; b) A natural strain of 
_Pseudomonas fluorescens_ is used to control fire blight.

http://www.apsnet.org/publications/apsnetfeatures/Pages/AntibioticsForPlants.aspx

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

"Many times"? Doubtful. Got anything more than McKenna's & similar FUD
to show us? Like Anders, I see antibiotic resistance as _a_ problem,
but not a TEOTWAWKI problem.

>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.

Gaia has an out-of-control _H. hubris_ infestation. If _H. hubris_
cannot handle the problem, Ma Nature will. 

-rex
-- 
The combination of some data and an aching desire for an answer does not
ensure that a reasonable answer can be extracted from a given body of data.
  --John Tukey