WN: Superbugs Threatens to Return Medicine to Dark Ages

[WorthyNewsBot]

LONDON (Worthy News)– Britain called for global action in development of a new generation of antibiotics to fight against the rising threat of drug-resistant superbugs which threaten to push medicine back into the "dark ages," Reuters reported.

Prime Minister David Cameron called on Wednesday for global action to tackle the threat of drug-resistant superbugs and said Britain planned to take a leading role in finding ways to spur the development of new antibiotics.

A world without effective antibiotics would push medicine back into the "dark ages", he said, with routine surgery, treatments for cancer and organ transplants potentially becoming impossible. —

Source

View the full article

[other one]

well, with no real profit attached, it's not likely to happen here in the US without government support.    Some of the latest are go expensive that my insurance people are rebelling.

 

I got some kind of insect bites last month that looked like they might be tick bites and the antibiotic prescription had a $90 copay.   For 20 pills.   And that was for the generic...    We don't use enough of the newer antibiotics to put it through the cost of getting FDA approval and making any profit.  From the time research starts on a drug a company has only 15 years before it's open for any and all generic competition.  It takes between ten to twelve years to do all the testing and you just can't recover the expense in three or four years.

[ayin jade]

First cameron is wrong. It wont send us back to the dark ages. Only set us back about 150 years to a time prior to antibiotics. This is something Ive been saying for years.

 

Which means that many surgeries and procedures cannot be done any more. 

 

What other one said about the unprofitability is correct. In the push to make meds affordable, the drug companies cant make a profit and have no incentive to find new antibiotics. It doesnt help that the cost for raw ingredients for making medicines are increasing at an unbelievable rate. 

[other one]

I would think to get back to the dark ages we would have to forget what germs and viruses are....   there are preventative ways not to get infections that they didn't have when they didn't realize where they came from......    They disposed of human waste in the streets during the dark ages....   We have insecticides that will kill the fleas and such if necessary.....    we could easily bring ddt back from oblivion if necessary...

 

but things like open heart surgery and even appendix problems would be the kiss of death for a majority of people.

 

My high school shop teacher's father hit himself in the thumb with a hammer and the resulting blood poisoning killed him, and that was just three generations ago from me.

 

 

We've kind of brought this on ourselves though by over using antibiotics for commerce instead of healthcare.

 

I would hate to see a bacteria become common that was immune to chlorine.....     that's the stuff of nightmares.

[Jay99]

scary....

[Guest Bethany]

I allready see these resistant bugs on my unit all the time...everyone has one: CRP, VRE, CRE,MRSA ....most popular

[Guest]

Administration Has Turned From Old Fashion Housekeeping 

The Daily Scribbing Down Of Everything 

Including The Walls 

In Favor Of 

 

Antibiotics

 

AL E X A N D ER F L E M I N G

 

Penicillin

 

Nobel Lecture, December 11, 1945

 

There may be a danger, though, in underdosage. It is not difficult to make microbes resistant to penicillin in the

laboratory by exposing them to concentrations not sufficient to kill them, and the same thing has occasionally happened in the body.

 

The time may come when penicillin can be bought by anyone in the shops. Then there is the danger that the ignorant man may easily underdose himself and by exposing his microbes to non-lethal quantities of the drug make them resistant.

 

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1945/fleming-lecture.html