It's in "Florey: The Man Who Made Penicillin" by Lennard Bickel
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sirolimus
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9634974/
(Full disclosure - spent my PhD working with macrolides including this one. It's an amazing origin story for a compound...)
The scientists looked in the soil samples
"Waaaaa why would you look in soil?? EWW!"
Anyway the compound stopped the fungus growing
"So it's sort of like it stopped time??"
Yes and it had a suppresive effect on the immune system
"So it's sort of like Elsa from Frozen it just freezes things??"
Yes, these are direct quotes from the episode, all within the first few minutes.
Antibiotics are lazy. Sure, some people have to die, but at least you didn't have to spend any time taking samples of the actual infection.
phages are found in large quantities in mucus, where they seemingly contribute to the barrier function of mucus by preying on any bacteria that try go cross
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23690590/
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1508355112
https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/mbio.01984-19
this might be adaptable for therapeutics
Most of the time the doctor doesn't know the exact pathogen you are infected with. He'll suspect a bacterian infection of some kind and prescribe a wide range antibiotic.
Doing what you suggest will require changing the way we do medicine. Which might not be a bad thing but requires some determination.
Bacteriophages fight bacteria. They actually do the fighting. They are quickly cleared by the body, so they are useless for prevention.
It should be promoted by governments.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/azeenghorayshi/navy-pha...
And since antibiotics still work (for now), there's not all that much money in phage research. If we do get to the point where we "run out" of antibiotics due to bacterial resistance, I imagine phage research will become a lot more attractive as a destination for research funding.
Antibiotics are found by isolating a compound some i.e. fungi naturally produces. We figure out how to produce the compound and don't fill people with fungi to produce it. Bacteriophages are already the analogy to the compound itself.
So we should be investing heavily in creating and distributing all variety of bacteriophage for all our common bacterial infections. 20k deaths/year from MRSA in the USA alone, 120k infections/year in USA and many of the survivors are left with life-long complications.
They must be making some novel improvements, though. Those original patents from the '60s are long expired by now.
It's like the claim that pharma had tripled the price of a 100 year old drug(insulin) that the inventors had sold for only $1 and were now charging $450 a month for it.
Then you dig into the claims and you find out that, the original insulin is still available, it's new formulations that have the higher cost.
>Until now, the only so-called “Walmart insulin” you could get for a lower price (roughly $25 to $35 per vial) was the older, human versions of insulin — R (or Regular) insulin, N (which is Novolin, aka NPH insulin); and a 70/30 mix of the two other types. Those formulations have been around since the early 1980s, but they work much differently and are seen as much less reliable than the analog insulins that first started appearing in the later 1990s. https://www.healthline.com/diabetesmine/walmart-relion-novol...
But the new stuff works better, is faster acting and allows a freer lifestyle.
I agree that there is a problem with the pharma industry but lying about the problem to try and get change is not going to help the cause.
I don’t know that it’s helpful to have such a blunt and un-nuanced take.
Theres no “certain oligarchy” that holds a single patent on "chemotherapy" as a broad concept, as it encompasses various chemical treatments for cancer. specific chemotherapy drugs and methods are patented by pharmaceutical companies and research institutions, for example:
- NanOlogy LLC: holds a patent for a method involving injecting large surface area microparticle taxanes directly into the tumor, combined with systemic delivery of immunotherapeutic agents.
- Johns Hopkins University: assigned patent rights for a method related to cancer treatment to Becton-Dickinson & Company, which then sublicensed them to Baxter.
- University of Cincinnati Clermont College: has a patent for breakthrough chemotherapy technology involving nanocarriers.
- Northeastern University: reports a patented molecule, WYC-209, that eliminates cancer cells.
However for children the number that die of infection in the UK is double that of cancer deaths - ( ~15% versus ~7% ) - and that's in an advanced economy.
Infection is a big problem.
In terms of barriers to making treatments - yes in part there is a problem with the right financial incentives - but it's not the only problem - finding molecules that simultaneously kill bacteria, won't be rapidly evolved around, and are safe to take isn't that easy. Then you have the problem of selectivity between bacteria - how many different sorts will it work with - 'good' verus 'bad' bacteria etc. Then you have the problem of being able to make the molecule at scale etc.
The good news is there is a constant bacteria on bacteria, fungus on bacteria chemical war going on - hence the paper.
The question is shouldn't we explore it more?
Put dangerous bacteria in contact with other bacteria, fungi, viruses, prisons, viroids, archaea and see what kill them, how and why?
Note from the paper - they stored the soil samples for a year on growth media before testing ( to allow any compunds to build up presumably ). That doesn't sound like a fast process.
Our knowledge of what's out there is quite biased by what grows well in the lab - probably less than 1% of all bacteria will grow on an agar plate.
Sanitation is the answer.
> ( ~15% versus ~7% ) - and that's in an advanced economy.
There were 1,507 infection related child deaths between 1 April 2019 and 31 March 2022 (3 years); an overall rate of 4.20 deaths per 100,000 children per year. This was the equivalent of 15% of all child deaths in this period.
Overall, in 90% of the infection related deaths the child had an underlying health condition, including 68% who had a life-limiting condition (e.g., cerebral palsy), and 22% who had another underlying health condition (including prematurity). 10% had no underlying health condition. In children where infection provided a complete and sufficient explanation of death, nearly a quarter (24%) had no underlying health condition.
Source: https://www.ncmd.info/publications/child-death-infection/#:~...
This sums up most of the problems with the late stage capitalism system we are forced to live in.
When I hear "{x} is not very profitable" I think people mean "we are not sure if we succeed doing {x} and it requires us to divert lots of resources from other things that we think would be more useful".
Pharma companies invest already huge amounts in drugs and many fail anyhow. Quote: "It takes 10 to 15 years and around US$1 billion to develop one successful drug. Despite these significant investments in time and money, 90% of drug candidates in clinical trials fail." (https://www.asbmb.org/asbmb-today/opinions/031222/90-of-drug...)
> Whether because they don’t adequately treat the condition they’re meant to target or the side effects are too strong, many drug candidates never advance to the approval stage.
And that doesn't sound "successful" at all. How much money is sunk into R&D at the point of failure is the much more relevant statistic to consider. If the pharmaceutical industry wasn't wildly profitable, they'd be investing those billions elsewhere, leaving drugs to a slow-cooking niche.
If you are interested in the topic, for example for oncology: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle... , to quote "Failed drug development in oncology incurs substantial expense. At an industry level, an estimated $50 billion to $60 billion is spent annually on failed oncology trials."
There is no "oracle" that says invest 50 million (or 100 million or 1 billion) in X or Y and it will succeed (in pharma or other domains). And this is not exclusively because of capitalism, it is because doing some things is hard.
When that question was more easily answered you could probably have pointed to macrophages.
Outright "communist" states like Cuba and Venezuela no longer have sponsors, and are sanctioned by the US, so they're exempt from having to prove that their economies could conceivably generate any innovation.
Right-wing "post-democratic" states like Russia and Hungary are, by some definition, capitalist, but you see no innovation there either. Presumably someone if not you could blame America for them being unable to innovate. One could equally say that their markets aren't free, because they're fully captured and manipulated by their respective mafia/oligarchies.
Ahem. Just like the so-called communist countries are.
Then of course there's China. Where capitalism is also a plaything of the governing power. Similarly, no major drug developments have come out of there. Although we did have a fantastic example recently of how not to manage a biolab doing gain of function research.
Pray tell, which countries without free markets do anything at all? I'm not holding my breath for North Korea to cure cancer, no matter how much of their GDP is spent trying to keep their Dear Leader alive.
Massive practical coordination problems, but I find the idea of consciously exploiting this "time dimension" really interesting.
The discovery shows that "there is terrifically interesting stuff
hiding in plain sight".Still, highly recommend people watch it. Great animation and art style, good writing and characterization, music is pretty rad and it's quite the trip at times.
Then again, the idea behind "28 Days Later" was that everyone got a cancer vaccine and turned into zombies...
This was not in the movie at all. It was the extremely contagious "rage" virus, inadvertently released by animal rights activists.
[1] https://www.media.mit.edu/groups/sculpting-evolution/overvie...
We have been lucky that we have found a few pathways that are not in human (read mammals) that are in bacteria we worry about. However bacteria just finds a different pathway and odds are that is a pathway in humans and so we can't use it because it would kill humans as well.
Gotta love capitalism.
It sounds like the main problem is a for-profit healthcare system.
This inability to bring a product to market is in fact an artifact of the for-profit healthcare system.
Besides the obvious aspects of weight-loss and erectile-dysfunction drugs being more profitable, there is also an issue with imaginary property.
Pharma will not bring a drug to market unless they can own exclusive rights. Since this is a naturally occurring molecule, some tweak will need to be made before the chemical is eligible for a patent.
So until some company can make a custom modification, without disrupting the efficacy, it won't be considered a viable product.
If that were the only, or principal, problem then surely we would notice that single payer systems do better by demanding production of other therapies.
Large pharma is going to develop in the US, where tax dollars fund a significant portion of research, and they get exclusive ownership of the resulting product.
Single payer systems do still display advantages for the drug's users.
Surely you've heard of people in the US buying prescription meds from Canada?
By asking a drug company to develop a therapy for a specific condition and offering to pay for it? Couple that with refusing to pay for drugs that do not offer good value for society as a whole.
This is crucial because the misuse of antibiotics in livestock farming has been a major driver of antimicrobial resistance (AMR), a global health crisis. When antibiotics are overused or improperly applied in animals, bacteria can evolve to become resistant, rendering these life-saving drugs ineffective for treating infections in humans and animals alike.
It has always been a perversity that life-saving reserve antibiotics were ever permitted to prop up the grotesque machinery of the modern food industry—a system built on global-scale animal cruelty.
What do you picture will happen because of protests, exactly? That the administration realizes the error of its ways? Because it seems more likely to me that they would use it as an excuse to implement more autocratic measures.
A protest isn’t supposed to be a singular event, it’s a series of events that crescendos into a movement—and it’s the crescendo that scares the people in power.
Other things like voting and getting elected do actually do something.
-roughly half of the us populace supports the current authoritarian regime and the other half's senators and representatives are largely useless and aren't even doing what they can except for say wearing an adult diaper while giving a 25 hour speech
-I fully plan on eventually moving to canada (or elsewhere) when the time comes - much easier to move than any other option
Are people really THAT lazy?
While I understand the disenchantment, just adding "none of the above" without committing to one of the offered options is not going to change a thing. You getting out on the streets and into politics is what changes things.
There are more than two candidates. At least in theory.
For example, it is frequently framed that there are only two (real) candidates, not voting or voting for a third party is the same thing as voting for <person I don't like>. The <person I don't like> is always Trump if you're talking to someone more on the left, and is Hilary/Biden/Kamala if talking to someone on the right, but the logic is the same (a contradiction should already be starting to be apparent). Both people are using the same logic to make the same claim, but they obviously can't both be correct.
It seems to me that the choice isn't actually binary. At least, if you insist that it is, then you must also conclude that a person actually gets two votes, because consider the following scenario:
Imagine that both major candidates (Candidate A and Candidate B) each deadlock and get 10 votes per, and a third party Candidate C gets 1 vote. I also have a vote, with the following possible outcomes:
1. I vote for Candidate A. This brings the total to A: 11, B: 10, C: 1
2. I vote for Candidate B. This brings the total to A: 10, B: 11, C: 1
If it were a binary, there wouldn't be any more possible outcomes. Yet,
3. I vote for Candidate C. This brings the total to A: 10, B: 10, C: 2
4. I abstain from voting. This brings the total to A: 10, B: 10, C: 1
All four of those outcomes are mathematically different, which doesn't seem possible if it's actually just a binary choice. If the outcome is different when I vote for Candidate B vs voting for Candidate C or not voting at all, then it seems self-evident that they are not the same thing. If I vote for A or B then they win, but if I vote C or not at all then there's a deadlock and a runoff. Clearly those are not the same thing.
Any of the supporters of "candidate A" or "candidate B" will have a vested interest to model it this way, because it can mean more votes for their candidate.
Things like Ranked Choice Voting change the dynamics. Some states have implemented this. I think AK & ME.
> Vote for the least evil person.
That's it. If everyone did this, then candidates would skew less evil. And after some amount of time, we would not have evil candidates.
Was Harris a good candidate. Certainly not. Was she less evil than Trump? By a mile. Would we be better off with Harris? Seems like that is coming true after a mere 2+ months.
In theory, if massive numbers of people all voted for C then C could get more votes than A or B, but the odds of that happening are so low that it's never once happened in the entire history of the nation. The incredibly low odds of winning millions in the lottery (something that routinely happens in the US) are much better than electing a third party candidate (something that has never happened in the US).
Since only A or B ever have a chance to win, your choice is limited to only A or B if you want to have any meaningful impact on the outcome, and because of that fact your choice becomes binary: Either meaningfully participate in the election (by voting for A or B), or don't meaningfully participate in the election at all (either by not voting or by voting for C).
The system could be fixed to give C a chance at winning, but that would require the same people who benefit from our two party system to support fixing it and not many are eager to hurt their own (or their own party's) odds of getting elected.
Why, so another country can fall apart because citizens throw their hands up in the air when they disagree with the other side - instead of trying to, say, change minds and fix things?
I actually agree that most of the people involved with politics are pretty cult-ish (especially the die-hard MAGAs), but I refuse to believe that 60 million people in the US are like that. Maybe it helps that I live in a very red area so I have regular and routine contact with a lot of people who I know voted for Trump but are generally and genuinely thoughtful and contemplative, but have different opinions/conclusions on the best solutions than I do. It strikes me as incredibly arrogant to assume that you are always right and someone else is always wrong.
Changing minds isn't easy, and it isn't fast, but it is clearly possible. Else how do you explain the shifts back and forth? Bush 41 -> Clinton -> Bush 43 -> Obama -> Trump -> Biden -> Trump? How do you explain the relatively rapid swing from opposition to support of gay marriage?
Funnily enough, I have a harder time convincing people that they do this and that it's significantly contributing to the problem, than I do arguing against those who those people would lump in with the "mass cult"
Funny, but tragic.
I completely understand this sentiment but hope you don't. Things are bad, but they're not going to get better if everyone who thinks they're bad leaves. The problem with a U.S. descent is that the negative impact will hit just about anywhere you try to parachute to.
Wherever you move, presumably it won't be a place where people think like you do (or you'll soon be moving again).
We couldn't even convince everyone to wear masks, this won't be an issue people will rise up in mass protests for... People are literally being kidnapped and thrown into detention centers without due process and there are not massive protests.
It takes a lot to make people protest, this ain't a battle for it.
For the record, there have been (and will be more) significant protests about this [0]. Corporate media does a fantastic job of ignoring and minimizing protests they're not in favor of (because they are actually effective...).
If you're old enough to remember, think back to how the world held some of the largest anti-war protests in history back in the early 00's. Turns out, corporate media with strong financial links to defense contractors aren't much interested in covering that. At the same time reporters who took too much of an anti-war stance were literally fired... And things have gotten progressively worse with every administration since.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15_February_2003_anti-war_prot...: "The British Stop the War Coalition (Stop) claimed the protest in London was the largest political demonstration in the city's history. Police estimated attendance as well in excess of 750,000 people and the BBC estimated that around a million attended."
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/feb/11/slugs-iraq-w...: "In February 2003, 1.5 million people protested in London against the looming Iraq war. They didn’t stop the conflict… but their legacy still looms large"
add in David Kelly - RIP - ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Kelly_(weapons_expert) ) and it's not a surprise that people are unconvinced that peaceful protest will achieve anything :/
Many people are unconvinced, yes... The thing is, look how hard corporate media and the yacht class work to shut it down. I think they're terrified of peaceful protest.
Honest question: What incentives do Corporate media have to ignore these current set of protests?
I mean... How much Chomsky have you read? He'll give you a much better overview than I could. This shit isn't new. I'll have a crack at the question though:
Major networks are owned by just five or six corporations. Their boardrooms and major shareholders interlock with defense contractors, private prison giants, and border security firms that make billions from deportation policies. Have you any idea how much of our money these fucks are pulling in? ... Every protest covered legitimately threatens their shareholders' portfolios. This also goes for big tech/social media.
Networks also fear losing access to both parties, which are pushing harsh immigration policies. Kamala swore to be tougher on immigrants than Trump, and Democrats have lately been crowing that Trump is deporting fewer people than Biden did.
Any "objectivity" is a thin facade. They don't want to challenge the immigration narrative that drives ratings among their core demographic, which is such a helpful distraction from inequality, and which is driving their shareholders portfolios up.
When forced to cover protests, media employs tactical reporting: dramatically under-counting crowds, obsessively focusing on any hint of disorder, and platforming the most extreme voices while ignoring reasonable demands. The well worn playbook is designed to delegitimize, and a horrifying proportion of Americans eat that shit up and ask for seconds.
The corporate media isn't neutral, or just biased. It's complicit. These issues matter hugely to the status quo they defend, and people recognizing their own power, and what our taxes are being spent on, is a massive threat to an unfathomably evil status quo.
"The media serve the interests of state and corporate power, which are closely interlinked, framing their reporting and analysis in a manner supportive of established privilege and limiting debate and discussion accordingly." - Chomsky, Necessary Illusions, 1988 (and look how media has consolidated since then)
Bezos, in his own words:
"I shared this note with the Washington Post team this morning:
I’m writing to let you know about a change coming to our opinion pages.
We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets. We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others. [...]"
"The general population doesn't know what's happening, and it doesn't even know that it doesn't know" - maybe even more true now than it was in 1993.
Codeword for "Jeff Bezos's continued monopolistic domination of online retail and logistics at the expense of everyone else". In other words, he's doing to right-libertarians what rich billionaires always do to right-libertarians. Play them like a fiddle.
It is a bit like a barrister not asking questions they don't know the answer to. They have a vision of the world they want to promote and typically aren't going to report on anything that they aren't confident to be neutral or non-threatening to that vision.
The corporate media's main tactic is to just put their worldview to people over and over again until any dissenters either run out of energy to push back or become marginalised. These groups exist because a someone or someones with money has a vision of the world they want to promote. Otherwise there isn't enough income to make the thing tick.
1. Protests are effective - no they're not, this is a myth because people believed they ended the Vietnam War. If you have power and a belief in doing something, why should you care if a random stranger doesn't like it?
2. Corporate media - this comes from the idea that everything bad is because of "corporations", common with Gen X people. The only successful media right now have strong personal opinions, although frequently those are evil personal opinions, and aren't solely motivated by profits.
3. Defense contractors - this comes from the idea that since war is bad, and corporations are bad, we must be doing wars because it makes money for defense companies. This is in fact totally false - they make less money during wars because they have to make boring products that work, whereas in peace time they get contracted to make fake superweapons we think sound cool. Wars are basically unprofitable for everyone.
4. And finally, if you think everything gets worse all the time this is actually depression and you should get it checked out.
MLK's civil rights movement was one of the most effective protests in history. If you said that they're not always effective I would agree, but to say that they're not ever effective? It doesn't hold up. Even in modern times they can continue to be effective — the BLM protests were a huge personal focus¹ of Trump's at the end of his second presidency; he hated that people were protesting and blaming him, and his advisers immediately recognized the protests as politically threatening to his reelection. BLM eventually lead to wide policing reforms in many cities and states.
¹ Source: Peril by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa
> BLM eventually lead to wide policing reforms in many cities and states
Did it? I mostly remember it leading to police doing work stoppages and no one noticing or being able to control them.
Like, the NYPD kidnapped de Blasio's daughter. SFPD just stopped issuing traffic tickets and hasn't restarted, and Oakland police just stopped enforcing everything, so the airport In n Out closed because literally all of their customers got their cars broken into.
Like I said, I do agree with you that there are protests which aren't effective, and there are some that are even counterproductive. BLM was successful though, it did lead to reforms: Minneapolis banned chokeholds and revised their use of force policies, New York reallocated some of its NYPD funding, Colorado and New Mexico passed police accountability laws, etc.
Anyway, I know your main point wasn't about BLM, I'm not trying to drag you into a mire over whether it was successful or not.
(It's too late to edit now, but just for posterity's sake, I meant they were a huge personal focus of Trump's at the end of his first presidency.)
They couldn't even decide if they wanted us to wear masks then lied about the efficacy in the opposite direction once they got called out for lying about the efficacy.
The answer is that most Americans still have pretty decent lives, and they like those in power (whether or not they are actually benefiting).
It often isn't, especially if you're the user using the plan.
Most states publish their approved premiums for healthcare.gov plans, and I don’t think I’ve encountered a self insured business plan with materially different premiums/deductibles/oop max.
I call it the violence event horizon: a whole lot of people's critical thinking just stops, as though an actual war will make things so much simpler.
In the mind of most Americans, the opposition to the Republican party is the Democratic party, which has been comparably insane lately, only a different direction.
A real opposition that the US politics needs is a kind of "common sense party" or "real needs party", but the FPTP election system, and the coasts vs "flyover states" division pushed by the forces that benefit from the "us vs them" division (most political forces) work against that. Forces like Forward Party, that sort of seem to fit the bill, are tiny.
People don't go out to streets just because; they need well-formulated ideas, some local leaders that would organize it, groups of like-minded people (online at least) that let the ideas brew and steep, etc. All this is not in a great shape now.
How do you see the democratic party being insane in a different direction?
Since we're all sickened by the poisons corporations put into our food/water/air/products and by a sedentary lifestyle which has been strictly enforced from the age of 5 we wouldn't last long without health insurance. Almost all Americans are just one uncovered medical expense away from bankruptcy and/or homelessness.
Even still, there have been a huge amount of protests recently. There are protests nearly every weekend in and around major cities. All those fired government workers have a lot more time on their hands so I expect that will continue (until their prescription medications start running out anyway)
https://wtop.com/dc/2025/03/vets-protest-trump-doge-and-musk...
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/02/17/anti-t...
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/02/05/anti-t...
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/thousands-across-the-u...
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2025/04/04/hands-off-pro...
https://www.npr.org/2025/03/29/nx-s1-5343986/anti-musk-prote...
Not protesting got Americans to this spot.
sincerely a 28 day per year paid vacation enjoyer.
Feels like we have a word for that: when you unnecessarily expend resources. I'm sure it'll come to me...
because of the current situation in the US...
If those import markets were open European producers would struggle to compete with US-agri due to its sheer volume and lack of interest in animal welfare and/or disease control. The UK specifically suffered issues in the past with such issues via "Mad Cow Disease" in the 90s and has attempted to reform its practices as a consequence.
Conversely US agri still seems to ignore these existential nightmares, as most recently seen with Bird Flu and the new administration's troubling ideas with how to deal with it (e.g. the suggestion to avoid culls in order to "find resistent birds").
They just don’t get the press, and no one expects better, so….
Poultry is an area where it might be a bigger problem because chickens grow WAY faster than cows and they live in absolutely deplorable conditions on factory farms. Birds need to be clean to stay healthy, and they can't stay clean stacked in little tiny cages or packed into dense flocks, and so they end up dosed with antibiotics because otherwise they need like 10x or more the land/floor area to not have swaths of the herd top die from natural diseases. A cow or pig covered in shit is just a cow or a pig, cow shit is basically dirt by time it comes out the other end it is so thoroughly digested, a bird covered in shit is going to be packed with disease and parasites.
Is this true? I can't find any source for this claim, just some old papers that suggest the number is closer to 30%, and various government sites that imply the practice is still in place around the world.
But that was about 20 years ago.
You're joking right? There's only one reason we have those tarriffs and that's: money. To protect our own EU market.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/why-is-c...
Big up NYC Hit Squad. :)
Penicillin production was revolutionized when it moved to Peoria, IL and found the famous cantelope:
https://www.pjstar.com/story/news/local/2019/04/25/peoria-pl...
It doesn't necessarily follow that using 2nd or 3rd tier antibiotics in limited cases in animal populations is always unwarranted, so long as we're aware of the potential for resistance and we're developing new ways to counter it. You have to play the cards you're dealt. Yes, the elimination of mass meat farming would go a long way toward preventing the adaptation of novel resistant bacteria. The situation, though, is that this type of farming will continue to happen for a long time. Regulations should prohibit the overuse of antibiotics, without completely preventing their use.
So you can suffer for weeks with an infection and high fever because the pharmacies won't sell you antibiotics because you don't have a paper from a doctor.
The references below focus on Aspergillus, but there are many such example in other fungal pathogens.
[1] Impact of the use of azole fungicides, other than as human medicines, on the development of azole‐resistant Aspergillus spp. https://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/efsajournal/pub/9200
[2] Celia-Sanchez BN, Mangum B, Gómez Londoño LF, Wang C, Shuman B, Brewer MT, Momany M. Pan-azole- and multi-fungicide-resistant Aspergillus fumigatus is widespread in the United States. Appl Environ Microbiol. 2024 Apr 17;90(4):e0178223. doi: 10.1128/aem.01782-23. Epub 2024 Apr 1. PMID: 38557086; PMCID: PMC11022549.
We, the people, have the power to improve this situation. Call your representatives, do activism, talk to your friends about it, vote for the right candidates.
Of course, this is exactly what authoritarian governments want. People who are exhausted, just poor enough but not too poor to start a revolution. People who don't have the time to read (really read, not watch TikTok videos) about important issues.
But I like to eat meat, and I have lots of other things in my life to worry about; doing something to improve this situation is nowhere near the list of things I will actually have the bandwidth to work on.
> they want others to lower their quality of life or spend more.
This is the other sucky part: while we should be paying the "real" cost of meat, I don't think it's fair to make meat only affordable to those who are fairly well-off. That sounds like something out of a dystopian speculative fiction novel.
I'm fine with the cost of a burger pricing in all these externalities, but I also don't like the idea of turning something like meat into a luxury good where only well-off people can afford it.
Why is that? What are the downsides of this scenario? Genuinely curious, as I believe this has been the norm historically.
Is there a word that’s the opposite of “tautology”? Because this question seems like an example. It maps to “what are the downsides of decreasing quality of life for most people”.
Antibiotic resistance implies "killing most of people faster" which in my book is worse than "decreasing quality of life for meat eaters".
I do eat meat occasionally, but I generally I am not able to eat all that I like each day (think: different cuisines, deserts, etc.) so maybe people just did not try enough stuff to enjoy more than one/two dishes... which in itself sounds sad to me.
We will always discover new drugs. Because we are smart due to animal fats we eat and our brains thrives with.
Also, why propose quiting raising cattle instead of a more careful using of the antibiotics when treating animals?
Beyond that I'd argue we should strive to minimize class-based access restrictions to food rather than artificaly enforce them.
>That's part of the problem. You wanting the burger has all these negative consequences for humans, animals and nature.
Now it sounds like you're saying you know there was a middle ground but were saying it anyway to make some kind of rhetorical point, but I don't know what rhetorical point you are making.
Apart from widespread illnesses, malnutrition, physical weaknesses and reduced life expectancy?
I don't disagree necessarily, but to be clear my comment was't directed at a wide audience, but rather directed at GP who did say something that to me would indicate heavily that they are either unaware of or choose not to acknowledge those fundamentals about human nature:
> You wanting the burger has all these negative consequences for humans, animals and nature.
I fully concede that I may be reading it too literally, but I don't think it's unreasonable to take what people say at face value. In fact I think that's the most reasonable thing to do as attempting to read minds over the internet quickly deteriorates conversation into talking past each other and people assuming you're lying/misrepresenting your true intentions (aka, reddit). I don't think I've interpreted their statement uncharitably either, though if I have that was inadvertent and was not my intention.
But also, my main point was more about the path to success than the tediously obvious truism. My main point is that shaming people for their nature isn't generally effective. I've seen this first-hand having grown up in a religious environment that heavily shamed sexual feelings/activity outside of marriage. The path to success (IMHO of course) is to develop palatable alternatives to meat.
Before discovering agriculture, we were hunters gatherers. Practicing agriculture allowed human population to expand tremendously.
If you forbid agriculture, how do you wish to proceed with eugenics and euthanasia? Because not practicing agriculture will probably only allow 2% of mankind to survive.
And if and when they do, our response would be to consider interventions, not to treat it as a reason to disengage from the problem of antibiotic resistance.
Though I suspect cheap lab grown meat (absent some reactionary political backlash like we've seen in Florida) can make it cheap and accessible to everyone and possibly bypass the concerns about antibiotics.
Do you know how many animals are killed farming a wheat field? We used to have to purge colonies of prairie dogs each spring in order to plant. Then there are the birds that get caught in the harvesters and the insects killed by the pesticides. It’s a horror show either way.
Personally I think lying about the timeline just gives ammunition to climate denialists because each time it's rolled out it creates a data point a denier can point at and say "look nothing happened".
Realistically if this is a problem it's my adult grandkids at most or great-grandkids who it would begin to impact.
I mean it's gradual up to a point, but when you can't survive anymore, it's not like you can ignore it.
> and the coping strategies will develop alongside.
Such as "drill baby, drill!" and tariffs :-).
We won't be in a post-apocalyptic hellscape in 10 years if that's your measuring stick for negative effects.
From the scientific models we have, we're pretty much screwed. From the measurements we make and compare to the models, it appears like the models are optimistic.
What's sad is that people like you now say "it's not as bad as they say" and 20 years from now you'll be the first ones to say "we didn't know, why didn't they tell us?".
> Realistically if this is a problem it's my adult grandkids at most or great-grandkids who it would begin to impact.
It's already impacting us. We are measurably living in a mass extinction that is happening faster than the one of the dinosaurs.
The way it's going, GenZ (probably millenials) are more likely to die from this than from age. After having lived in global war times. Anyone in their thirties or less being anxious about their retirement are missing the bigger problem they will be facing at that age.
2) Your ire is misdirected. Whether this individual does or does not eat meat has 0.000000001% impact on the meat production industry. Your energy is much better spent advocating for policies that reduce overall meat consumption, as the GP was voicing their support for.
We're at a point where whoever thinks we're fine is totally uninformed. We're living in a mass extinction that is measurably happening faster than the one of the dinosaurs (spoiler: they disappeared). We're going for 4 degrees warming (and that's a conservative estimate), which means that half of the planet will become uninhabitable (as in, if you stay outside without life support, you die). What happens when half the planet wants to move (together with all their military force) where the other half of the planet is?
And what's the answer to that? "Hmm I think we will miraculously find a solution, in the meantime I want my burger".
> Completely agree. Reducing or getting rid of livestock animal agriculture will help with many major challenges we have today, like climate change, loss of biodiversity, animal cruelty, antimicrobial resistance. But hey, gotta have that cheap burger, huh?
They said "I don't care if it's cheap, but I want my burger".
Can you understand where I come from?
There are models of agriculture that achieve better sustainability by using a small number of livestock as unskilled labor to emulate the wild environments that the plants our gene stock come from were adapted to. This will likely be the model moving forward, especially as petrochemical fertilizers get more expensive.
“Just enough” livestock will still get too old to breed or provide labor. They will still have too many babies in good weather and need to be culled in subsequent bad years. That doesn’t put T-bone steaks on everybody’s plate, but it does provide enough animal protein to approximate the traditional Asian diet of a few ounces of animal protein per day, as soup stock and a bit of variety.
The future will still have chicken soup even if burger joints go away.
My kids enjoy eating meat and dairy. I hope my grandchildren will, too, because is healthy to have a well balanced diet.
Cheese has been with us for millennia. About half as long as we have had civilization. Other cultures (yogurt, etc) for I don’t know how long. But the fixation on milk is largely a product of oversupply.
And stop eating meat and fish! It's insane for many reasons even if you don't care about how the animals are treated:
* Biodiversity loss: because we kill everything in the sea by fishing, and we kill everything in the fields for intensive agriculture (which is needed to feed the cattle). And because of deforestation of course. * Antibiotic-resistance: because putting so many animals (fishes or cows) together brings diseases we need to treat. * CO2 emissions: it's super inefficient, we all know it.
Not being a vegetarian in 2025 is just completely unreasonable.
We had Greta Thunberg talking to politicians, but actually I'm looking forward to when kids will ask their parents: "So you know you are killing us in so many ways, and you can't be arsed to eat less meat? Aren't you supposed to care about us?"
Note that apart from the rainwater one, I do none of the above, so I'm not even pleading for myself and my "way of life". I'm just showing how easy it is to boldly state that "it is obvious, we just all have to be reasonable" while, in fact, _not_ being "reasonable" yourself.
Stopping to eat meat/fish is probably the one thing that is reasonably easy, cheap (vegetarian food is globally cheaper), and would have a huge impact.
And raising cattle dates from the dawn of civilization. It was sustainable tens of thousands of years and suddenly became unsustainable in the last ten years?
You really don't have a clue how it works, do you? I'm genuinely concerned.
Far from a counterpoint, they testify to the reasonableness of the request in this instance, of stepping away from factory farming, because it belongs to a class of similar and well respected recommendations. Getting people to actually change their behavior is an important issue, and the purpose of recognizing it should be to reckon with it in a serious way rather that use it to tee up complaints about hypocrisy that seem to imply the futility of doing anything.
Again, not a personal attack, but do you follow all of these actions (I could add more similar ones)? Do you own or use a car? Have you ever taken a flight? Went on a cruise? Ate cashews or almond milk? If so, why are you doing this? Why are you (to use the terms stated by OP), so unreasonable, unwilling to do so simple things for your children?
I'm not saying that any action is futile, but that the cost (monetary or otherwise) to take them is _vastly_ underestimated and basically swept under the rug with arguments of reasonableness and simplicity.
And, just to restate, I am not defending my own lifestyle, it's not an emotional argument to make for me.
My concern is that both sides are frustratingly obvious and are corrections in search of someone or something to be corrected. I don't think that anything you're saying is strictly wrong, but I think it's baffling to offer in this context where it seems to be a counterpoint in a room full of people who already agree with it (except for maybe that I-want-my-cheeseburgers-at-any-price guy). This is what I mean about Learned Sage comments, and I think the fix is to cover your bases with charitable interpretation.
I'm arguing against : "So you know you are killing us in so many ways, and you can't be arsed to eat less meat? Aren't you supposed to care about us?"
You can replace "to eat less meat" by basically a thousand different "reasonable" things. Does that mean that _literally everyone on earth_ is willingly "killing their children and not caring about them"?
I really dislike those arguments patronizing everyone. They achieve nothing -- actually quite the contrary, at _best_ they do nothing for someone who do not feel targeted, at worst they turn people against your cause. There's a difference between stating that each of us can and should take action because those are needed and saying that everyone not doing X is a child killer. If someone suggest that I should stop drinking almond milk, I would consider it. If they introduce this by telling how ashamed I should be and how my children will hate me for this -- but not for long since they will soon be dead anyway because of me -- well, maybe I'll just ignore an otherwise perfectly reasonable and fact-based suggestion.
Still, personally I try to let myself challenged even if the argument is patronizing. I don't want to say "I will not do X because you made a patronizing argument!". But for the cases I conclude it is actually a good idea, I will try to explain to the people making the argument "you would have convinced me easier if communicated like this".
Last time I checked humans are omnivores, not herbivores.
I don't want to get ill, acquire some physical weaknesses because there are unreasonable people on the internet.
Saying things like "it's unreasonable to eat meat and fish" a very ignorant in more than one way.
Don’t stop there, because being a vegetarian (lacto or ovo) has a larger environmental burden too. Go vegan instead.
Of course getting people to learn about these things and politicians to adopt sensible policies about it is a whole other game.
Who cares ? As long as we have cheap eggs and burger patties!!!
I dread it when any generic medication I get is made in india or china since the fda doesn't meaningfully regulate/test their stuff
Ranitidine was pulled from US shelves. Indians sell it online. It's the real deal.
Alldaychemist is legit, but I've only bought dermatological/beauty stuff there.
I've even bought Modafinil from some US based website that shipped from India. Customs believed it was legit and seized a few shipments. One that got through didn't do shit but maybe it's just me.
Ultimately resistance can evolve that kicks in only on exposure to the chemicals in question. Bacteria already do this with, say, the enzyme needed to metabolize lactose. The gene isn't expressed until lactose is present.
Kill it three different ways at once and it cannot adapt fast enough to leave dna fragments for the next microbe to pick up and continue the work.
AFAIK there is a new class of molecules specific to thwarting the resistance mechanism that makes the bacteria susceptible again in ways that cannot be out evolved. I'm looking for the general name for this technique - I do remember reading about it.
Regarding this detail, there has been only one pandemic recently and it has not been attributed to 'meat agriculture', though it may have involved wild meat.
Assuming that's true, when was the last time it happened?
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/12/health/fda-to-phase-out-u...
But will it kill humans too?
There's lots of antibiotics out there. Most of them will kill everything, including us, and we don't want them.
"Researchers have discovered a new antibiotic molecule that targets a broad range of disease-causing bacteria — even strains resistant to commercial drugs — and is not toxic to human cells. [1]"
"[1] Jangra, M. et al. Nature https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-08723-7 (2025)."
That's why I prefer Science Alert and their RSS'.
Sure they do, by the general mechanism of preventing the drug from entering the bacterium and/or pumping it back out. Bacteria have general mechanisms for removing molecules they don't need.
This molecule is a peptide, so one mechanism for developing resistance would be evolution of a specific protease. Bacteria already have enzymes for breaking peptide bonds.
And if you do spend the $1bn to get there, you end up like Achaogen. For anyone in this field, read this teardown of Achaogen: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-024-03452-0
Antibiotic resistance is as much a political problem as a biology one.
Formulas for "antibiotics of last resort" (I would consider a newly designed one in this category) should not be sent to Pharma companies of these countries, rather, the antibiotics should be pre-dosed and mailed over from a country who can maintain the integrity of the formula in a limited fashion to keep their effectiveness high so they can continue to serve patients years into the future.
It sucks, but we've watched antibiotics be abused so badly that babies are born into hospitals where they catch resistant infections nearly right after childbirth. I blame the antibiotics-for-every-cough medical practices common in some countries (I've seen this happen myself!)
Centigonal•6d ago
I learned about it through this video, but there's a lot to explore beyond this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ig6ktJGTWk