Infections

Hey, it's OK - you don't need

Hey, it's OK - you don't need to take any AB's to get the benefit of micro doses. All you need to do is eat a good portion of industrial (read conventional) poultry or beef and you receive all the bennies of their doses, which they need to overcome the effects of being fed rich corn and soy based foods that irritate their guts and then being made to live in crowded pens up to their knees in nastiness.

JosephTree wrote:Hey, it's

JosephTree said:

Hey, it's OK - you don't need to take any AB's to get the benefit of micro doses. All you need to do is eat a good portion of industrial (read conventional) poultry or beef and you receive all the bennies of their doses, which they need to overcome the effects of being fed rich corn and soy based foods that irritate their guts and then being made to live in crowded pens up to their knees in nastiness.

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Feeling a bit under the weather? Just eat a chicken!

Ahcuah wrote: Think about how

Ahcuah said:

Think about how antibiotics work. They kill off the germs. The germs that are particularly suscecptible to the antibiotic die early. However, there will be some with genetic differences that will let them resist the antibiotic for a while.

If you stop the antibiotic early, the germs that are left are the ones that have some resistance to that antibiotic. So they will multiply (and also diverge genetically, producing some offspring even more resistant to the antibiotic).

So your infection comes back from these partially resistant germs, and with some new germs that are more resistant. So, the antibiotic doesn't work so well this time. If you keep this up, you can develop strains of germs that are completely resistant to the antibiotic.

That's how strains such as MRSA (google it) came to be.

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Precisely. Couldn't have said it better myself.

megabarefoot said:

However, I don't follow. What have you experienced to make you say something like that? What is the difference between stopping the perscription now and allowing it to run it's course? Especially considering that it was prescribed in ignorance of what caused the infection nor any consideration for the locality of the infection.Nothing I've ever read or experienced even implies that cutting off a 'script of ABs is harmful

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You have obviously not done much reading then. What Ahcuah said is exactly right. You can't keep killing off the weakest of a species and allowing the strongest to live and expect them not to get stronger. You have to kill them all off. Any one who understands how biology really really works will agree with this. There are two massive reasons that these strains of antibiotic resistant bacteria are emerging. One is simply over prescribing. This is the doctors fault. The other is people saying, well I'm all better, I'm going to stop these. This is both the patients fault for not listening to directions, and the doctors for not taking the time to explain WHY that little line on the medicine bottles says to finish the whole prescription. If people don't understand that this is actually semi imperative, they aren't going listen.

Now my qualifications. I'm 4 years into my Ph.D. program at a very highly ranked university. I'm getting it in biophysical chemistry. One of my projects have included looking at how possible antimicrobial peptides interact with membranes in order to destroy bacteria and studying how those interactions could be used to develop new small molecules that would make new antibiotic. I've gone to a two week conference where probably 80% of the lectures were focused on the ribosome and how we can target it in bacteria to make new antibiotics. This in addition to having a rather large interest in the field in general and the science background required to really really understand everything I read or at least be able to go look up enough to get a very good understanding of it. People don't understand how insanely difficult it is to develop a new antibiotic. Just making the thing is impossible. Actually getting it passed through the FDA is worse. Then add to the fact that there really isn't nearly as much profit in that as there is something like viagra and you have a problem. Companies aren't willing to invest money in something that they can't make real profit off from. This pretty much leaves the entire burden of it on universities who are supposed to be doing basic research not applied things of the sort. There are not many things that make me seriously concerned for our evolutionary saftey, but honestly this is one of them. People in this day and age should not be dying of skin infections, and yet if we keep up with our current ways of dealing with antibiotics that is going to become far more widespread than you might think. And for the record, I'm not an overly dramatic person who goes on tirades all that often. This just happens to be something that I am incredibly well versed in and understand very very well, and the better you understand this the scarier it all is.

So you are right stopping antibiotics half a course through won't affect that one person, but if we all do that and we continue to do it we'll be in massive trouble as a species.