The Golden Era Of Antibiotics

May be coming to an end:

My generation is only the second to live its entire lifespan in the age of antibiotic miracles. My grandparents were born into a world where the son of the President of the United States could die from an infected blister he got while playing tennis without socks. It was a world where almost everyone over the age of 60 who got pneumonia died (hence it’s moniker: “the old man’s friend”.) Where surgery was a deadly risk and deaths from childbirth were all too common.

Most of the lurid abortion statistics that you hear about hundreds or thousands of women dying every year from illegal abortions come from that era too; while the number of deaths was undoubtedly elevated by unsanitary conditions at back-alley abortionists, even abortions in hospitals would have been extraordinarily risky, because the risk of infection could never entirely be eliminated. Most of the decline in deaths from abortions actually came before the Roe decision, and the timing makes it clear that this was mostly due to antibiotics, with a small assist from better blood banking. All of which is to point out that in a world without antibiotics, you’d have to think real hard before undertaking any sort of elective invasive procedure.

For my parents’ generation, it was normal to lose cohorts while growing up — for mine, it was unusual. It wasn’t just antibiotics, of course — it was also vaccines. Mine was the first generation to not have to worry about polio. But for antibiotics at least, those days may be coming to an end, and we may have to look at other (perhaps nanotechnological) solutions to killing bad bugs. Or return to the bad old days. This is a rare area, in fact, where I think that government spending should be increased.

13 thoughts on “The Golden Era Of Antibiotics”

  1. Antibiotics has also made us lax on hygene. Instead of busting people for minor amounts of pot, we should be tcketing them for leaving the bathroom without washing their hands IMO.

    Agressively applied hygene standards can stop most nasty bugs before they get started.

    1. Do you think we need to “bust” people for leaving the bathroon after having washed their hands? Maybe the emphasis on day-to-day hygiene is leaving people without vigorous immune systems?

      1. I do actually. I have seen people do number 2 and not wash. There are people dead today because somebody did not wash their hands. That and our influx of people from the third world carrying these now untreatable lethal diseases has me to the point that my normially libertarian self thinks this should be an offense against the law.

  2. My grandparents were born into a world where the son of the President of the United States could die from an infected blister he got while playing tennis without socks.

    I remember my gym teacher in junior high school (1970’s) telling us about that story, to illustrate the importance of wearing proper gym socks.

  3. Hopefully Dragonlab will be flying soon giving researchers another option for research. Previous experiments on the Shuttle showed both both research on the effect of antibiotics and their production is enhanced in microgravity.

  4. The concern is real, but I wonder if it isn’t overhyped. The original penicillin was becoming useless within a decade of introduction, resistance had already developed to the point that new antibiotics had to be developed. And it hasn’t changed. For each new antibiotic there is a sweet period when it works great, then in a few years has to be replaced. There are a few new ones in the pipeline. The main problem now is that it takes years to get permission to market new drugs, and the profit margins are not high enough to justify the study.
    Since we have many thousands of fine biological scientists already on the government payroll, as college professors and grad students, how about we redirect a few of them to looking for new antibiotics? It is a pretty simple process. You take some soil, plate it on nutrient agar, and look for bare rings showing a naturally produced antibiotic in action. Well, that probably won’t happen, too much like work, and boring. Still, if the government really thought this was a problem…

  5. If it’s about national security (not phony but real) certainly the government should consider funding it more. Protecting the lives of citizens falls under that category.

  6. This is an area where the ‘market rewards’ sometimes aren’t in alignment with the goals. (Palliatives versus curatives.)

    So if we’re going to do subsidies, do so with significant prizes. And if we have to have a Death Tax, this would seem a perfect direction and apportionment strategy: Dedicate the death tax to the prizes for actually curing the relevant causes of death.

  7. This is a rare area, in fact, where I think that government spending should be increased.

    Except for the unfortunate fact that anything that extends life adds to Social Security, Medicare and ObamaCare costs. Having people die early due to infection isn’t a bug (no pun intended) but a feature.

  8. One of the areas where Soviet Russia was actually doing rather well was in the therapeutic use of bacteriophage viruses against bacterial infections. Unfortunately for everyone, this method doesn’t lend itself all that well to large-scale mass production – and that’s all that Big Pharma is interested in unless they can charge tens of thousands of dollars per course (as in some of the latest cancer treatments).

  9. “This is a rare area, in fact, where I think that government spending should be increased.”

    I disagree. One could get more innovation in antibiotics by eliminating the FDA and their lengthy, expensive approval process.

Comments are closed.