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This article was originally published on The Conversation, an independent, non-profit source of news, badysis, and commentary from academic experts. Disclosure information is available on the original site.
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Author: Gerry Wright, Professor of Biochemistry and Biomedical Sciences, McMaster University
I have grown convinced of the trajectory of progress. in science and medicine – that human health would continue to improve as it did for hundreds of years. During my career in the health sciences, I have continued to be optimistic.
Now, I have serious doubts.
Science still works well, but formidable obstacles block the path between research and progress in the field I work in: Antibiotics
The threat to humanity is severe and worsens day by day day, but for reasons beyond my colleagues and myself, there seems to be an astonishing little collective will to do much about it.
This week (November 12-18) is World Antibiotic Awareness Week. We must talk about this threat. We must develop models of public-private cooperation – to incite, finance and invest in the discovery and development of antibiotics
Penicillin led to complacency
Here is the problem: about 75 years ago. , science has introduced penicillin into public use, ushering in a new era in the control of infectious diseases, like sanitation. Infectious diseases such as pneumonia and strep throat, which were usually fatal even in the time of my grandparents, were tamed – at least for a time.
In the generations that followed, life expectancy jumped 25 years and the infectious disease dropped from its No. 1, a place among all the causes of death, where it was still better ranked than bullets and bombs, even during the world wars.
With inexpensive, abundant and effective antibiotics, people in developed countries let go of self-satisfaction. control the infection.
But all the while, while we lived better and longer, infectious diseases made a comeback and today they are knocking on the door. In fact, they are already breaking the door.
The Market Will not Respond to Demand
In an Accelerated Example of Darwinian Adaptation by Natural Selection, Bacteria and Other Microbes Develop to Survive Antibiotics . They will continue to adapt and succeed unless humanity builds new layers of defense in the form of new antibiotics and other creative approaches.
Governments around the world recognize the crisis, as they affirmed at a special high-level meeting of the United Nations General Assembly in 2016 and the G20 in 2017.
What is troubling, is that we know what we need to do to create new antibiotic treatments. Although the work is undeniably difficult, there are already new older drugs and others are under development.
Unfortunately, they are not yet available on the commercial market and they may never succeed unless something changes to make them viable – not as medicines, but as commodities.
The major obstacle to the production of new antibiotics is our own economic model, which trusts the market to meet demand. As the philosopher and economist Adam Smith said, the invisible hand does not work here and all the progress made possible by antibiotics is at stake.
The public model is risky
In the United States, last summer, two pharmaceutical companies obtained FDA approval for new antibiotic compounds. As soon as the markets learned that these companies had created drugs that could literally save the world, their stocks dropped.
This seems counterintuitive, is not it? It turns out that spending hundreds of millions of dollars to create, test and market a new drug is a serious risk, unless the drug can recover its investment in the 20 years before the expiration of his patent.
It's hard to do when you try. to recover the cost of an order of 10 days at a time. And when you prescribe the new drug only for infections that can not be resolved with traditional and cheap antibiotics, which still work in many cases.
The only way to create new antibiotics would be commercially sound. astronomically expensive, in the range of rare anticancer drugs, and who would pay for it?
Many argue that we should consider antibiotics the same way we look at fire departments. As individuals, we may never need them, but we are all willing to share the costs because we expect them to be there.
A public model seems logical, but who will take the political risk?
[1965- Hospitals under threat
Without intervention: the public, through its governments around the world, cooperates with the private sector to encourage, fund and invest in the discovery and the development of antibiotics – the end of effective antibiotics be scary.
This will be done gradually, but it will certainly happen. The first steps are already in the form of multi-resistant antibiotic infections that threaten the basic functioning of hospitals.
Next, we will see routine procedures such as dental hygiene appointments and permanently canceled replacements because of the risk of infection.
People of all ages will begin to die from diseases that we are used to dealing with pills worth $ 10 or $ 20. Those who do not die will be sick more often and longer, thus increasing the cost of care.
Life expectancy could be reduced to what it was in the early 1900s, and the golden age of antibiotics would appear to have been only a brief and happy blip in the story.
It does not have to be that way. Let's put our awareness in action.
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This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Disclosure information is available on the original site. Read the original article:
https://theconversation.com/humanity-under-threat-from-antibiotic-re https: //theconversation.c
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