3:33am October 25, 2013

CDC official: we’ve reached “the end of antibiotics”

In an interview accompanying a Frontline episode on drug-resistant bacteria, an associate director for the CDC, Dr. Arjun Srinivasan, says that “we’re in the post-antibiotic era”.

The more you use an antibiotic, the more you expose a bacteria to an antibiotic, the greater the likelihood that resistance to that antibiotic is going to develop. So the more antibiotics we put into people, we put into the environment, we put into livestock, the more opportunities we create for these bacteria to become resistant. …We also know that we’ve greatly overused antibiotics and in overusing these antibiotics, we have set ourselves up for the scenario that we find ourselves in now, where we’re running out of antibiotics.

We are quickly running out of therapies to treat some of these infections that previously had been eminently treatable. There are bacteria that we encounter, particularly in health-care settings, that are resistant to nearly all — or, in some cases, all — the antibiotics that we have available to us, and we are thus entering an era that people have talked about for a long time.

For a long time, there have been newspaper stories and covers of magazines that talked about “The end of antibiotics, question mark?” Well, now I would say you can change the title to “The end of antibiotics, period.”

We’re here. We’re in the post-antibiotic era. There are patients for whom we have no therapy, and we are literally in a position of having a patient in a bed who has an infection, something that five years ago even we could have treated, but now we can’t.

You know how when you first hear a joke it’s the funniest thing ever and then you hear it a second time and it’s less funny and then a third, fourth, and fifth times and it just keeps getting less and less funny until you’re not laughing at all and it actually becomes annoying? That’s how antibiotics work across the entire human population. And if Dr. Srinivasan is correct, we’re transitioning into the not laughing stage and the annoying stage where lots of people start dying can’t be far behind (unless we get some new jokes/treatments).

Yesterday, Mark Sample tweeted about disasters, low-points, and chronic trauma:

“Low point” is the term for when the worst part of a disaster has come to pass. Our disasters increasingly have no low point.

After the low point of a disaster is reached, things begin to get better. When there is no clear low point, society endures chronic trauma.

Disasters with no clear low point: global warming, mass extinction, colony collapse disorder, ocean acidification, Fukushima.

To which I would add: drug-resistant infectious diseases. (via digg)

Geez yes this.

I freak out about this a lot because I take a good deal more antibiotics than most people do. Except that I can’t avoid taking them: I have bronchiectasis and until I got my feeding tube I was getting constant lung infections. I’ve almost spent more time on antibiotics this year than off, until recently.

And any time I aspirate I have to go on antibiotics. Because if I don’t, by the time I get the infection it could be too late. This is why preventing aspiration is okay.

And then any time I’m hospitalized they’re worried about exposing me to resistant infections. And this sometimes means they don’t hospitalize me when I badly need it, or wait until things are much worse than they should’ve waited until.

And I’m still in a better situation than a lot of people. Ugh.

Notes: