The Peak of Antibiotic Validity - 2

Generals Daryl & Daryl in the War on Bugs

I

This series began about four years ago as a critique of one of the many illegitimate wars civilization makes on itself.

This is not about the loser war on legit drugs that Big Pharma does not like, or the oil wars incessantly fought for a century, and still going strong.

Nor is it about the nuclear war that began at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which is now in hiatus, but still anxious to get started again.

Nor is it about the global war on the Earth, which now has the damaged climate system staggering to stay off its knees, as it raises ocean levels and endangers civilization.

II

This is a post about the war on the most populous, yet the tiniest life forms that we rely on for our very lives:

As they look beyond the genome ... researchers are ... awakening to the fact that some 90 percent of the protein-encoding cells in our body are microbes. We evolved with them in a symbiotic relationship, which raises the question of just who is occupying whom.

Altogether ... 99 percent of the functional genes in the body are microbial.

... genes in this microbiome — exchanging messages with genes inside human cells ...

... shifts in perspective, occurring throughout cellular biology ... seem as dizzying as what happened in cosmology ... issues once thought settled are up in the air.
...
The microbes cohabitating our body outnumber human cells by a factor of 10, making us actually “superorganisms” that use our own genetic repertoire as well as those of our microbial symbionts, says Julie Segre, who works on the Human Microbiome Project at the National Human Genome Research Institute, in Bethesda, Md. We just happen to look human because our human cells are much larger than bacterial cells ... no matter how you look at it, it’s high time we acknowledge that part of being human is being microbial.

(The Tiniest Scientists Are Very Old - 2, Aug. 2011). Firing a shotgun into a crowd is a felony, unless you are General Daryl & Daryl administering antibiotics as warriors in the war on bugs:

Today we will visit upon another defect in that system, which is the increasing disease exposure which that system is producing.

Specifically, the fetish-like overuse of antibiotics as a be all cure all for just about anything and everything, which said overuse is going to reach a peak, to then fit into the realm talked about in the book "The Peak of Everything":

The arms race between humanity and disease-causing bacteria is drawing to a close—and the bacteria are winning. The latest evidence: gonorrhea is becoming resistant to all standard antibiotic treatment ... If it seems to you that the drumbeat of bad news with respect to antibiotic resistance has become louder and more insistent in the past few years, you would be right ... Researchers reported in January that they had for the first time collected samples of E. coli bacteria from the Antarctic with particularly dangerous drug-resistance genes.

(Scientific American). This is the result of the medical system in America willfully ignoring years of warnings, much like the congress, presidents, and big business having ignored of years of warnings about global warming dangers.

It is quite possible that we destroy the good bacteria, a.k.a., microbes, when "we", i.e., Dr. Strangelove,  strafe and cluster bomb our bodies to rid ourselves of one pathogen.

(The Peak of Antibiotic Validity, Feb. 2012). The Big Pharma University has only succeeded in educating pathogens about how to become immune to the drugs the official drug peddlers have smuggled into society.

III

The war on non-official Big Pharma drugs failed, and so has the war on cellular life:

"For the first time, researchers have found a person in the United States carrying bacteria resistant to antibiotic of last resort, an alarming development that the top U.S. public health official says could signal 'the end of the road' for antibiotics." - (Washington Post)
...
"Late last year, a team of of Chinese and UK researchers shocked the global public health world when they identified a strand of E. coli circulating among Chinese pigs that had developed resistance to colistin, a "last resort" antibiotic that's used only to treat pathogens that can resist other antibiotics. Worse still, they found, the gene that allowed the E. coli to withstand the potent drug can easily jump to other bacterial species—including nasties like salmonella—and is 'likely' to go global. The researchers didn't mince words: 'All the key players are now in place to make the post-antibiotic world a reality,' one of them told the BBC.

So, uh-oh: Researchers at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Maryland have just found colistin-resistant E. coli in a person here in the United State. In response to the bad news from China, the Walter Reed crew had just begun in early May to screen all the E. coli samples that came through the facility's medical-testing lab for the presence of that highly mobile colistin-resistant gene. It didn't take them long to find a positive test, which they reported Thursday in the journal Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy. The discovery 'heralds the emergence of truly pan-drug resistant bacteria,' they wrote." - (Mother Jones)
...
"A mutant strain of E. coli, resistant to even the toughest antibiotics, has been found in the United States, federal health officials said Thursday.

The bacteria, discovered last month in a 49-year-old Pennsylvania woman with a urinary tract infection, contains a gene known as mcr-1, making it resistant even to colistin, a decades-old antibiotic that has increasingly been used as a treatment of last resort against dangerous superbugs." - (Huffington Post).

IV

The murderous, suicidal tendencies of warmongers knows no bounds (Oil-Qaeda & MOMCOM Conspire To Commit Depraved-Heart Murder, 2, 3).

The giggly, clueless, and misnamed "positive attitude" trance of culture is utterly unaware of reality (Choose Your Trances Carefully, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6).

The previous post in this series is here.

---

"You can always count on Americans to do the right thing - after they've tried everything else." - Winston Churchill

---