Most importantly, the use of novel antibiotics must be strictly prohibited in the animal food industry.
This is crucial because the misuse of antibiotics in livestock farming has been a major driver of antimicrobial resistance (AMR), a global health crisis. When antibiotics are overused or improperly applied in animals, bacteria can evolve to become resistant, rendering these life-saving drugs ineffective for treating infections in humans and animals alike.
It has always been a perversity that life-saving reserve antibiotics were ever permitted to prop up the grotesque machinery of the modern food industry—a system built on global-scale animal cruelty.
US is well known for its questionable high scale farming practices that often have no interest in any sort of animal welfare. Its one of the primary reasons for import controls across Europe for US meat products. It comes up every time the UK or EU negotiate trade deals with the US and came up extremely often during Brexit.
If those import markets were open European producers would struggle to compete with US-agri due to its sheer volume and lack of interest in animal welfare and/or disease control. The UK specifically suffered issues in the past with such issues via "Mad Cow Disease" in the 90s and has attempted to reform its practices as a consequence.
Conversely US agri still seems to ignore these existential nightmares, as most recently seen with Bird Flu and the new administration's troubling ideas with how to deal with it (e.g. the suggestion to avoid culls in order to "find resistent birds").
The US has a ton of problems with agriculture, but I find half of people's complaints about antibiotic use in US farming reaching far beyond what is actually happening in reality. I often hear people complain about antibiotics being in their milk or beef, but there are absolutely no antibiotics in your milk because a single cow on antibiotics getting its milk in a 10,000 gallon tanker will cause the entire load to be dumped, and it is tested for in every batch. As for beef, maybe once in awhile, but feeding a 1,200+ pound animal enough antibiotics for months to increase its weight that extra 5% is going to cost you nearly as much as the entire animal is worth.
Poultry is an area where it might be a bigger problem because chickens grow WAY faster than cows and they live in absolutely deplorable conditions on factory farms. Birds need to be clean to stay healthy, and they can't stay clean stacked in little tiny cages or packed into dense flocks, and so they end up dosed with antibiotics because otherwise they need like 10x or more the land/floor area to not have swaths of the herd top die from natural diseases. A cow or pig covered in shit is just a cow or a pig, cow shit is basically dirt by time it comes out the other end it is so thoroughly digested, a bird covered in shit is going to be packed with disease and parasites.
> As for beef, maybe once in awhile, but feeding a 1,200+ pound animal enough antibiotics for months to increase its weight that extra 5% is going to cost you nearly as much as the entire animal is worth.
Is this true? I can't find any source for this claim, just some old papers that suggest the number is closer to 30%, and various government sites that imply the practice is still in place around the world.
Im sure there are a few places in India and China that still do it where alfalfa is expensive while antibiotics cost pennies. But it certainly isn't happening in the US where growing grass is as close to free as anything gets but antibiotics cost a decent amount of money. A 800 pound cow is only worth around $250 pounds to a farmer, so even a 30% increase, which is far beyond optimistic, is at best going to net you $75 extra, which is not going to cover the many months worth of antibiotics it took to dose an animal that large.
Ethical doesn't have to mean non-functional. Like I previously highlighted the "mad cow" disease pandemic of the 90s shows that these "soft" ideas of not feeding cows beef scraps actually have functional outcomes, despite seeming ethnical at first. This is also evidenced by free-range chickens having less potential exposure to bird flu than hatchery chickens who are packed so close together that the virus can sweep through the entire facility.
the two are not unrelated. if it were purely about the money, they EU wouldn't enact any animal welfare and environmental regulations - but they do. of course they have to protect their markets now, but the question is whether the U.S. model is sustainable. china, for example, is outsourcing its pork production to the U.S. because it's deemed too toxic.
Hrrm. Learning by accident, I think. I recall news lines about the failure of ventilation causing mass deaths in the 10s of 1000s. Because they die in the vapors of their own shit, that fast, if packed so dense.
i was told not to use cedar bedding for chicks as "the smell is too strong, it suffocates them." I'll extrapolate that if cedar scent kills chicks, it isn't too far a stretch that their waste can also suffocate them, as that's actually putrid smelling, whereas cedar just smells nice.
I don't know if there's much merit in opposing antibiotic use in cattle if that position is just a small coincidental component of your broader pro-disease ideology.
The average person doesn't have capacity to care about policies that lead to the long term development of drug-resistant bacteria.
We couldn't even convince everyone to wear masks, this won't be an issue people will rise up in mass protests for... People are literally being kidnapped and thrown into detention centers without due process and there are not massive protests.
It takes a lot to make people protest, this ain't a battle for it.
> People are literally being kidnapped and thrown into detention centers without due process and there are not massive protests.
For the record, there have been (and will be more) significant protests about this [0]. Corporate media does a fantastic job of ignoring and minimizing protests they're not in favor of (because they are actually effective...).
If you're old enough to remember, think back to how the world held some of the largest anti-war protests in history back in the early 00's. Turns out, corporate media with strong financial links to defense contractors aren't much interested in covering that. At the same time reporters who took too much of an anti-war stance were literally fired... And things have gotten progressively worse with every administration since.
I liked mandmandam's answer, but there is also the short version:
It is a bit like a barrister not asking questions they don't know the answer to. They have a vision of the world they want to promote and typically aren't going to report on anything that they aren't confident to be neutral or non-threatening to that vision.
The corporate media's main tactic is to just put their worldview to people over and over again until any dissenters either run out of energy to push back or become marginalised. These groups exist because a someone or someones with money has a vision of the world they want to promote. Otherwise there isn't enough income to make the thing tick.
> What incentives do Corporate media have to ignore these current set of protests?
I mean... How much Chomsky have you read? He'll give you a much better overview than I could. This shit isn't new. I'll have a crack at the question though:
Major networks are owned by just five or six corporations. Their boardrooms and major shareholders interlock with defense contractors, private prison giants, and border security firms that make billions from deportation policies. Have you any idea how much of our money these fucks are pulling in? ... Every protest covered legitimately threatens their shareholders' portfolios. This also goes for big tech/social media.
Networks also fear losing access to both parties, which are pushing harsh immigration policies. Kamala swore to be tougher on immigrants than Trump, and Democrats have lately been crowing that Trump is deporting fewer people than Biden did.
Any "objectivity" is a thin facade. They don't want to challenge the immigration narrative that drives ratings among their core demographic, which is such a helpful distraction from inequality, and which is driving their shareholders portfolios up.
When forced to cover protests, media employs tactical reporting: dramatically under-counting crowds, obsessively focusing on any hint of disorder, and platforming the most extreme voices while ignoring reasonable demands. The well worn playbook is designed to delegitimize, and a horrifying proportion of Americans eat that shit up and ask for seconds.
The corporate media isn't neutral, or just biased. It's complicit. These issues matter hugely to the status quo they defend, and people recognizing their own power, and what our taxes are being spent on, is a massive threat to an unfathomably evil status quo.
"The media serve the interests of state and corporate power, which are closely interlinked, framing their reporting and analysis in a manner supportive of established privilege and limiting debate and discussion accordingly." - Chomsky, Necessary Illusions, 1988 (and look how media has consolidated since then)
This is outdated. These days billionaires openly and publicly tell the owned media what to write.
Bezos, in his own words:
"I shared this note with the Washington Post team this morning:
I’m writing to let you know about a change coming to our opinion pages.
We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets. We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others. [...]"
It's true, it's not a very well kept secret. And still, even if most Americans distrust it, the vast majority of us remain wildly ignorant of just how bad our media really is.
"The general population doesn't know what's happening, and it doesn't even know that it doesn't know" - maybe even more true now than it was in 1993.
Codeword for "Jeff Bezos's continued monopolistic domination of online retail and logistics at the expense of everyone else". In other words, he's doing to right-libertarians what rich billionaires always do to right-libertarians. Play them like a fiddle.
How many millions joined those street protest? Not saying it is a bad cause but there has not been any significant protests about it with any significant % of the popultion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15_February_2003_anti-war_prot...:
"The British Stop the War Coalition (Stop) claimed the protest in London was the largest political demonstration in the city's history. Police estimated attendance as well in excess of 750,000 people and the BBC estimated that around a million attended."
> it's not a surprise that people are unconvinced that peaceful protest will achieve anything :/
Many people are unconvinced, yes... The thing is, look how hard corporate media and the yacht class work to shut it down. I think they're terrified of peaceful protest.
I think they’re scared of what the protest represents. A protest is “peaceful” as long as it wants to be; the Black Lives Matter protests showed this can change very quickly.
You meet people who are terrified by mice and spiders. Doesn't mean that they are threatened by them. I've yet to see a protest that was the decisive part of a political movement; they don't do anything. It is easier to get a message out there with a stopthewar.tld website than a protest. Websites are articulate, protests are just a mess.
There's like four different New Left misconceptions here.
1. Protests are effective - no they're not, this is a myth because people believed they ended the Vietnam War. If you have power and a belief in doing something, why should you care if a random stranger doesn't like it?
2. Corporate media - this comes from the idea that everything bad is because of "corporations", common with Gen X people. The only successful media right now have strong personal opinions, although frequently those are evil personal opinions, and aren't solely motivated by profits.
3. Defense contractors - this comes from the idea that since war is bad, and corporations are bad, we must be doing wars because it makes money for defense companies. This is in fact totally false - they make less money during wars because they have to make boring products that work, whereas in peace time they get contracted to make fake superweapons we think sound cool. Wars are basically unprofitable for everyone.
4. And finally, if you think everything gets worse all the time this is actually depression and you should get it checked out.
> Protests are effective - no they're not, this is a myth because people believed they ended the Vietnam War. If you have power and a belief in doing something, why should you care if a random stranger doesn't like it?
MLK's civil rights movement was one of the most effective protests in history. If you said that they're not always effective I would agree, but to say that they're not ever effective? It doesn't hold up. Even in modern times they can continue to be effective — the BLM protests were a huge personal focus¹ of Trump's at the end of his second presidency; he hated that people were protesting and blaming him, and his advisers immediately recognized the protests as politically threatening to his reelection. BLM eventually lead to wide policing reforms in many cities and states.
The civil rights movement was effective of course, but they were very, very careful about how they did things, and iirc the public protests were part of an intentional media strategy because TV would show them doing nothing and getting attacked by police.
> BLM eventually lead to wide policing reforms in many cities and states
Did it? I mostly remember it leading to police doing work stoppages and no one noticing or being able to control them.
Like, the NYPD kidnapped de Blasio's daughter. SFPD just stopped issuing traffic tickets and hasn't restarted, and Oakland police just stopped enforcing everything, so the airport In n Out closed because literally all of their customers got their cars broken into.
There's no doubt that it lead to pushback in a lot of places, but that just highlights why people were protesting in the first place. When the police kidnap the mayor's daughter, or walk off the job in response to calls for accountability, it's not a failure of the protest but rather a failure of the institutions being protested.
Like I said, I do agree with you that there are protests which aren't effective, and there are some that are even counterproductive. BLM was successful though, it did lead to reforms: Minneapolis banned chokeholds and revised their use of force policies, New York reallocated some of its NYPD funding, Colorado and New Mexico passed police accountability laws, etc.
Anyway, I know your main point wasn't about BLM, I'm not trying to drag you into a mire over whether it was successful or not.
> We couldn't even convince everyone to wear masks
They couldn't even decide if they wanted us to wear masks then lied about the efficacy in the opposite direction once they got called out for lying about the efficacy.
It took 30 years between Lenin's brother being executed by the state, and the Russian revolution. History has momentum, and the gains from the New Deal are still enough that many Americans dont feel comfortable putting their bodies on the line. People's dispositions are a function of their material reality and the reality is that most people haven't internalized the damage yet.
Also Americans have always allowed government over reach and corruption on the assumption that the AR-15 they have a pretty good grouping on at weekends is what'll solve the problem if it gets "really bad".
I call it the violence event horizon: a whole lot of people's critical thinking just stops, as though an actual war will make things so much simpler.
As I look at it, rhetorically, when is the point for a US citizen where taking up arms against the US government seems less dangerous than business as usual? I’d say it’s still quite a ways off for most.
What do you picture will happen because of protests, exactly? That the administration realizes the error of its ways? Because it seems more likely to me that they would use it as an excuse to implement more autocratic measures.
Protests let people at home who are feeling alone in their frustration that there are many more people who feel like them. I also felt like you did until someone framed it that way for me.
A protest isn’t supposed to be a singular event, it’s a series of events that crescendos into a movement—and it’s the crescendo that scares the people in power.
Then, since there are more people who voted for the current administration, there can be even more powerful counter protests. Then we can have people fighting in the streets, then a civil war.
Are you really trying to say that people should not protest, unless they are the overwhelming majority or easily ignored, because their protest will (or even just might) turn into a civil war?
-roughly half of the us populace supports the current authoritarian regime and the other half's senators and representatives are largely useless and aren't even doing what they can except for say wearing an adult diaper while giving a 25 hour speech
-I fully plan on eventually moving to canada (or elsewhere) when the time comes - much easier to move than any other option
> -I fully plan on eventually moving to canada (or elsewhere) when the time comes - much easier to move than any other option
I completely understand this sentiment but hope you don't. Things are bad, but they're not going to get better if everyone who thinks they're bad leaves. The problem with a U.S. descent is that the negative impact will hit just about anywhere you try to parachute to.
If you don't bother to vote, then you're [almost literally] saying you're OK with whoever wins. If that wasn't your intention, you would vote for some third party that you were OK with.
It's not an opinion poll. People vote to try and get their desired outcome. If someone views their preferred minor candidate as a lost cause in electoral terms, they won't bother going to vote because it won't make any difference to the outcome. Or, worse, there isn't a single candidate on the list in their district who shares their views.
What we need is to start counting votes of no confidence. Until we can explicitly shoot down what the elites or representatives think is best for us, at best, voting is just a thin veneer of legitimacy over an ossifying oligarchy.
Italy's parliament had for a long time a system where you could vote "no confidence" without picking a constructive option. It did not serve them well and they abolished it eventually.
While I understand the disenchantment, just adding "none of the above" without committing to one of the offered options is not going to change a thing. You getting out on the streets and into politics is what changes things.
That is such a reductionist view as to be totally worthless. You think there are zero other reasons someone might not vote, be able to vote, or not support either candidate?
Can you explain this logic a bit more because it genuinely confuses me, but I hear it articulated so often that I feel I must be missing something. I find it helpful to walk through the logic:
For example, it is frequently framed that there are only two (real) candidates, not voting or voting for a third party is the same thing as voting for <person I don't like>. The <person I don't like> is always Trump if you're talking to someone more on the left, and is Hilary/Biden/Kamala if talking to someone on the right, but the logic is the same (a contradiction should already be starting to be apparent). Both people are using the same logic to make the same claim, but they obviously can't both be correct.
It seems to me that the choice isn't actually binary. At least, if you insist that it is, then you must also conclude that a person actually gets two votes, because consider the following scenario:
Imagine that both major candidates (Candidate A and Candidate B) each deadlock and get 10 votes per, and a third party Candidate C gets 1 vote. I also have a vote, with the following possible outcomes:
1. I vote for Candidate A. This brings the total to A: 11, B: 10, C: 1
2. I vote for Candidate B. This brings the total to A: 10, B: 11, C: 1
If it were a binary, there wouldn't be any more possible outcomes. Yet,
3. I vote for Candidate C. This brings the total to A: 10, B: 10, C: 2
4. I abstain from voting. This brings the total to A: 10, B: 10, C: 1
All four of those outcomes are mathematically different, which doesn't seem possible if it's actually just a binary choice. If the outcome is different when I vote for Candidate B vs voting for Candidate C or not voting at all, then it seems self-evident that they are not the same thing. If I vote for A or B then they win, but if I vote C or not at all then there's a deadlock and a runoff. Clearly those are not the same thing.
You'll notice that in every one of your possible outcomes there's zero chance of C ever winning. That's the reality. When it comes to presidential elections, voting for C means you throw away your chance to vote for someone who actually has a chance to win.
In theory, if massive numbers of people all voted for C then C could get more votes than A or B, but the odds of that happening are so low that it's never once happened in the entire history of the nation. The incredibly low odds of winning millions in the lottery (something that routinely happens in the US) are much better than electing a third party candidate (something that has never happened in the US).
Since only A or B ever have a chance to win, your choice is limited to only A or B if you want to have any meaningful impact on the outcome, and because of that fact your choice becomes binary: Either meaningfully participate in the election (by voting for A or B), or don't meaningfully participate in the election at all (either by not voting or by voting for C).
The system could be fixed to give C a chance at winning, but that would require the same people who benefit from our two party system to support fixing it and not many are eager to hurt their own (or their own party's) odds of getting elected.
The calculus of voting is really simple, even when there are only 2 candidates:
> Vote for the least evil person.
That's it. If everyone did this, then candidates would skew less evil. And after some amount of time, we would not have evil candidates.
Was Harris a good candidate. Certainly not. Was she less evil than Trump? By a mile. Would we be better off with Harris? Seems like that is coming true after a mere 2+ months.
I have seen people consider the outcome is one of "candidate A wins" or "candidate B wins" (so binary). I do not fully agree, but practically it seems to be a good approximation - as in 30 years nobody reached something significant, and there was only one instance in 1872 when the 3rd candidate had more than 30% (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_third-party_and_indepe...)
Any of the supporters of "candidate A" or "candidate B" will have a vested interest to model it this way, because it can mean more votes for their candidate.
The simple fact of the matter is that 68% of eligible US voters either voted for Trump or didn't care enough to stop him even though he was upfront about what he would do and already served a disastrous term. They're all equally responsible.
Will this teach them anything? This is a very serious question and I don't know the answer. For the people who didn't vote, will they learn that voting matters? For the people who did, will they learn anything? I remember countless videos of them before the election saying "oh, he won't do that, he's just saying that to get votes" ... well, he will do that. And more. Are they ok with it??
Why, so another country can fall apart because citizens throw their hands up in the air when they disagree with the other side - instead of trying to, say, change minds and fix things?
It does get much easier to throw up your hands and dismiss "the other side" if you dehumanize them and think of them as just a mass cult.
I actually agree that most of the people involved with politics are pretty cult-ish (especially the die-hard MAGAs), but I refuse to believe that 60 million people in the US are like that. Maybe it helps that I live in a very red area so I have regular and routine contact with a lot of people who I know voted for Trump but are generally and genuinely thoughtful and contemplative, but have different opinions/conclusions on the best solutions than I do. It strikes me as incredibly arrogant to assume that you are always right and someone else is always wrong.
Changing minds isn't easy, and it isn't fast, but it is clearly possible. Else how do you explain the shifts back and forth? Bush 41 -> Clinton -> Bush 43 -> Obama -> Trump -> Biden -> Trump? How do you explain the relatively rapid swing from opposition to support of gay marriage?
> It does get much easier to throw up your hands and dismiss "the other side" if you dehumanize them and think of them as just a mass cult.
Funnily enough, I have a harder time convincing people that they do this and that it's significantly contributing to the problem, than I do arguing against those who those people would lump in with the "mass cult"
Americans are too busy going to work, with an increasing number of them needing more than one job just to get by. If people protest instead of working they will be fired which means they'll also lose their health insurance.
Since we're all sickened by the poisons corporations put into our food/water/air/products and by a sedentary lifestyle which has been strictly enforced from the age of 5 we wouldn't last long without health insurance. Almost all Americans are just one uncovered medical expense away from bankruptcy and/or homelessness.
Even still, there have been a huge amount of protests recently. There are protests nearly every weekend in and around major cities. All those fired government workers have a lot more time on their hands so I expect that will continue (until their prescription medications start running out anyway)
The only benefit of health insurance purchased via employers is that you can use pre-tax income to pay for it. Otherwise, it has all the same deductibles and out of pocket maximums as policies purchased on healthcare.gov, except for government employees and some unionized businesses.
The answer is that most Americans still have pretty decent lives, and they like those in power (whether or not they are actually benefiting).
Not necessarily. The risk profile of the group in a specific self insured business is not guaranteed to be healthier than one not part of a business.
Most states publish their approved premiums for healthcare.gov plans, and I don’t think I’ve encountered a self insured business plan with materially different premiums/deductibles/oop max.
Trump administration is branded as "Republican", even though Republican icons like Reagan would be appalled by it.
In the mind of most Americans, the opposition to the Republican party is the Democratic party, which has been comparably insane lately, only a different direction.
A real opposition that the US politics needs is a kind of "common sense party" or "real needs party", but the FPTP election system, and the coasts vs "flyover states" division pushed by the forces that benefit from the "us vs them" division (most political forces) work against that. Forces like Forward Party, that sort of seem to fit the bill, are tiny.
People don't go out to streets just because; they need well-formulated ideas, some local leaders that would organize it, groups of like-minded people (online at least) that let the ideas brew and steep, etc. All this is not in a great shape now.
Though I believe that still pales in comparison to US agricultural use. Based on some rough data sources I think the US uses about 2-3x more antibiotics on livestock than India uses on people.
The relative usage isn't even the primary issue. The surrounding conditions are. Farms are ideal breeding grounds for quite a few reasons. Add to that rather barbaric practices that can result in treatment periods dragging on quite a bit and the result isn't at all surprising.
There is also a not insignificant portion of "animal antibiotics" that people buy to use themselves because they can't afford the 6x markup on "human" antibiotics plus the doctors fees only to get the same pill made in the same factory with a slightly different label slapped on it.
One use of antibiotics in the cattle industry is as a way of increasing weight in livestock. It's theoretically discouraged now for that purpose now in the US, but last I looked there were large loopholes for preventative health purposes in herd management
Is that true? Since it should not be imported / available let alone perscribed if it doesn't pass the checks. And especially in the US, a doctor wouldn't hand it out if it didn't have the right paperwork because they would be litigated out of their livelihood.
Ranitidine was pulled from US shelves. Indians sell it online. It's the real deal.
Alldaychemist is legit, but I've only bought dermatological/beauty stuff there.
I've even bought Modafinil from some US based website that shipped from India. Customs believed it was legit and seized a few shipments. One that got through didn't do shit but maybe it's just me.
Unfortunately, in terms of antifungals both the EU and US are still using tons of them in the context of agriculture [1] which is contributing to drug resistance of human pathogenic fungi [2].
The references below focus on Aspergillus, but there are many such example in other fungal pathogens.
[2] Celia-Sanchez BN, Mangum B, Gómez Londoño LF, Wang C, Shuman B, Brewer MT, Momany M. Pan-azole- and multi-fungicide-resistant Aspergillus fumigatus is widespread in the United States. Appl Environ Microbiol. 2024 Apr 17;90(4):e0178223. doi: 10.1128/aem.01782-23. Epub 2024 Apr 1. PMID: 38557086; PMCID: PMC11022549.
In most EU countries it is very hard to reach a doctor in decent time unless you can afford to pay a lot.
So you can suffer for weeks with an infection and high fever because the pharmacies won't sell you antibiotics because you don't have a paper from a doctor.
In which EU country do you live? I moved twice and I never had this experience. Visits this routine can be done almost without delay, sometimes directly off the street inbetween scheduled patients.
Here in Ireland I've never had to wait more than a few hours to see a doctor to get a prescription for an infection. Can be a bit harder at the weekend but still seen the same day
Can you list some of the countries? I am curious, because in my country i can be seen within few days or call my doctor i need to. There are also consulting doctors that can be reached, if GP is not available. costs about 4 euros per visit.
Just as long as we don't start overusing the cocktail. Natural selection is a very powerful force, all it takes is one bacterium in a million that has resistance to all three methods to start an evolution.
Ideally you shelve several antibiotics for decades, with the goal of bacteria dropping resistance to it. Sounds like a game theory compliance nightmare though.
And there may be general resistance mechanisms that hit more than one chemical (like changes in membrane permeability and efflux pumps.) Over time, with more exposure, the costs can be expected to decline as resistance is optimized.
Ultimately resistance can evolve that kicks in only on exposure to the chemicals in question. Bacteria already do this with, say, the enzyme needed to metabolize lactose. The gene isn't expressed until lactose is present.
Antibiotics are not a deterrence because bacteria cannot be negotiated with. Similarly the concerns of fallout are minimal. The evolved resistance comes at a cost, evolving many resistances comes at many costs. There is a point where the bacteria cannot continue to evolve resistances yet remain competitive in the absence of the antibiotics.
AFAIK there is a new class of molecules specific to thwarting the resistance mechanism that makes the bacteria susceptible again in ways that cannot be out evolved. I'm looking for the general name for this technique - I do remember reading about it.
Meat agriculture, as practiced in most of the world on an industrial basis with insufficient regulation, leads to pandemics, evolution of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, climate change, and air, water, and soil pollution.
Regarding this detail, there has been only one pandemic recently and it has not been attributed to 'meat agriculture', though it may have involved wild meat.
But we can see throughout history that the prevalence of disease follows closely with societies that raise animals. That said, I think it is a poor excuse for advocating against animal husbandry. Disease will always exist and spread, but keeping livestock and pets does increase the chances of it happening a bit.
Completely agree. Reducing or getting rid of livestock animal agriculture will help with many major challenges we have today, like climate change, loss of biodiversity, animal cruelty, antimicrobial resistance. But hey, gotta have that cheap burger, huh?
We, the people, have the power to improve this situation. Call your representatives, do activism, talk to your friends about it, vote for the right candidates.
> We, the people, have the power to improve this situation. Call your representatives, do activism, talk to your friends about it, vote for the right candidates.
And stop eating meat and fish! It's insane for many reasons even if you don't care about how the animals are treated:
* Biodiversity loss: because we kill everything in the sea by fishing, and we kill everything in the fields for intensive agriculture (which is needed to feed the cattle). And because of deforestation of course.
* Antibiotic-resistance: because putting so many animals (fishes or cows) together brings diseases we need to treat.
* CO2 emissions: it's super inefficient, we all know it.
Not being a vegetarian in 2025 is just completely unreasonable.
We had Greta Thunberg talking to politicians, but actually I'm looking forward to when kids will ask their parents: "So you know you are killing us in so many ways, and you can't be arsed to eat less meat? Aren't you supposed to care about us?"
By this logic, having a car in 2025 is "just completely unreasonable". Taking plane in 2025 is "just completely unreasonable". Use of AC unless life threatening circumstances is "just completely unreasonable". Wasting rainwater and use drinkable water to wash your car (or yourself, actually) is "just completely unreasonable". Eating cashew/almond or other highly water intensive crops grown in a dried out area (California...) is "just completely unreasonable".
Note that apart from the rainwater one, I do none of the above, so I'm not even pleading for myself and my "way of life". I'm just showing how easy it is to boldly state that "it is obvious, we just all have to be reasonable" while, in fact, _not_ being "reasonable" yourself.
Yes! I'm not sure what the your intended upshot here is, but those absolutely would be beneficial changes in behavior and are perfectly in line with prevailing recommendations of ways behaviors need to change to mitigate the worst impacts of climate change, and related recommendations more broadly in line with environmental conservation and public health.
Far from a counterpoint, they testify to the reasonableness of the request in this instance, of stepping away from factory farming, because it belongs to a class of similar and well respected recommendations. Getting people to actually change their behavior is an important issue, and the purpose of recognizing it should be to reckon with it in a serious way rather that use it to tee up complaints about hypocrisy that seem to imply the futility of doing anything.
The thing is, I'm not arguing against the fact (yes, the fact) that doing this would beneficial. I'm saying that stating how "simple" and "reasonable" are these actions is missing the point.
Again, not a personal attack, but do you follow all of these actions (I could add more similar ones)? Do you own or use a car? Have you ever taken a flight? Went on a cruise? Ate cashews or almond milk? If so, why are you doing this? Why are you (to use the terms stated by OP), so unreasonable, unwilling to do so simple things for your children?
I'm not saying that any action is futile, but that the cost (monetary or otherwise) to take them is _vastly_ underestimated and basically swept under the rug with arguments of reasonableness and simplicity.
And, just to restate, I am not defending my own lifestyle, it's not an emotional argument to make for me.
I might have missed something, but I don't see anyone suggesting such changes are easy. If anything, I feel like I'm seeing opposite arguments, imploring people to understand that we're working against human nature.
My concern is that both sides are frustratingly obvious and are corrections in search of someone or something to be corrected. I don't think that anything you're saying is strictly wrong, but I think it's baffling to offer in this context where it seems to be a counterpoint in a room full of people who already agree with it (except for maybe that I-want-my-cheeseburgers-at-any-price guy). This is what I mean about Learned Sage comments, and I think the fix is to cover your bases with charitable interpretation.
Not sure what's your point though. I do think people will always do "some" unreasonable things, but doing all reasonable things at once and as much as we can is probably not smart so we should at least discuss it. How large should a burger be? How many times per day should you wash your car? What temperature should you use for your AC? Don't know, but if someone tells me they eat 1kg burger at each meal, they wash their car 3 times a day and they put the AC to 15 in the summer I would tell them they are not reasonable and that they can enjoy life better if they change a bit their habits.
This, I absolutely agree with.
Yes, there are small things you can do which (collectively) _can_ have an impact.
I'm arguing against : "So you know you are killing us in so many ways, and you can't be arsed to eat less meat? Aren't you supposed to care about us?"
You can replace "to eat less meat" by basically a thousand different "reasonable" things. Does that mean that _literally everyone on earth_ is willingly "killing their children and not caring about them"?
I really dislike those arguments patronizing everyone. They achieve nothing -- actually quite the contrary, at _best_ they do nothing for someone who do not feel targeted, at worst they turn people against your cause. There's a difference between stating that each of us can and should take action because those are needed and saying that everyone not doing X is a child killer. If someone suggest that I should stop drinking almond milk, I would consider it. If they introduce this by telling how ashamed I should be and how my children will hate me for this -- but not for long since they will soon be dead anyway because of me -- well, maybe I'll just ignore an otherwise perfectly reasonable and fact-based suggestion.
Definitely it should not be patronizing. Presentation was so bad for various important topics (burning fossil fuels, nutrition habits, sex stuff, etc.).
Still, personally I try to let myself challenged even if the argument is patronizing. I don't want to say "I will not do X because you made a patronizing argument!". But for the cases I conclude it is actually a good idea, I will try to explain to the people making the argument "you would have convinced me easier if communicated like this".
I call this bad faith. You're right, living the way we live is unsustainable. That's why almost all species are dying, and that's not yet a consequence of global warming. Now, some things are harder to change than others, and have more or less impact.
Stopping to eat meat/fish is probably the one thing that is reasonably easy, cheap (vegetarian food is globally cheaper), and would have a huge impact.
Well, humans and other omnivores species do need the rapport of animal diet.
And raising cattle dates from the dawn of civilization. It was sustainable tens of thousands of years and suddenly became unsustainable in the last ten years?
It is natural for humans to eat and desire to eat meat. You might as well criticize people for having sex drives (which clearly sometimes lead to negative outcomes), or needing to urinate, or criticizing dogs or lions for their eating of meat. I think we can and should develop alternatives and put our higher levels of intellect to use, but that isn't going to change our natures and it's not reasonable to expect large amounts of people to voluntarily choose to become monks and forsake the natural man. If you really want to fix things, developing more sustainable and healthy replacements is the way, not trying to shame them for their naturally-endowed characteristics.
At this point we're trafficking in tediously obvious truisms. This is Learned Sage Warns Powerball Not As Much After Taxes territory. I don't think anyone imploring us to change agricultural practices is unaware of these fundamentals about human nature. Presenting them in this context as if they represent a counterpoint implies that there's a fundamental futility to even trying, which I think takes the convo in the wrong direction.
> I don't think anyone imploring us to change agricultural practices is unaware of these fundamentals about human nature.
I don't disagree necessarily, but to be clear my comment was't directed at a wide audience, but rather directed at GP who did say something that to me would indicate heavily that they are either unaware of or choose not to acknowledge those fundamentals about human nature:
> You wanting the burger has all these negative consequences for humans, animals and nature.
I fully concede that I may be reading it too literally, but I don't think it's unreasonable to take what people say at face value. In fact I think that's the most reasonable thing to do as attempting to read minds over the internet quickly deteriorates conversation into talking past each other and people assuming you're lying/misrepresenting your true intentions (aka, reddit). I don't think I've interpreted their statement uncharitably either, though if I have that was inadvertent and was not my intention.
But also, my main point was more about the path to success than the tediously obvious truism. My main point is that shaming people for their nature isn't generally effective. I've seen this first-hand having grown up in a religious environment that heavily shamed sexual feelings/activity outside of marriage. The path to success (IMHO of course) is to develop palatable alternatives to meat.
>I don't think anyone imploring us to change agricultural practices
Before discovering agriculture, we were hunters gatherers.
Practicing agriculture allowed human population to expand tremendously.
If you forbid agriculture, how do you wish to proceed with eugenics and euthanasia? Because not practicing agriculture will probably only allow 2% of mankind to survive.
You can't just say something is bad and expect billions of people to change their wants in order to achieve your political and moral goals.
I'm fine with the cost of a burger pricing in all these externalities, but I also don't like the idea of turning something like meat into a luxury good where only well-off people can afford it.
What are the downsides of taking a relatively affordable good that people enjoy and making it a luxury good for the rich only?
Is there a word that’s the opposite of “tautology”? Because this question seems like an example. It maps to “what are the downsides of decreasing quality of life for most people”.
It is about choices. You gain a certain amount of money and you can do various things with them. You can choose to eat 100 burgers I can choose to eat 100 carrots and buy a TV.
Antibiotic resistance implies "killing most of people faster" which in my book is worse than "decreasing quality of life for meat eaters".
I do eat meat occasionally, but I generally I am not able to eat all that I like each day (think: different cuisines, deserts, etc.) so maybe people just did not try enough stuff to enjoy more than one/two dishes... which in itself sounds sad to me.
It only has been a "norm" for a few thousand years during the agricultural era for the poorest of the poor, who could neither obtain hunting privileges, afford to keep their own animals, had no access to food, work or communal programs, which provided them with some meat, or there were significant famines which made the culling of livestock necessary.
Beyond that I'd argue we should strive to minimize class-based access restrictions to food rather than artificaly enforce them.
What is the downside of the scenario where only the rich can afford to own houses or land? After all historically, the rich owned the land and just allowed the poor to live there.
I'm not seeing how that context makes your comment make more sense. I am not seeing that they were charged with any kind of unreasonable extrapolation along the lines of "wanting to end meat consumption," nor why that would create context that sets up your dichotomy.
Now it sounds like you're saying you know there was a middle ground but were saying it anyway to make some kind of rhetorical point, but I don't know what rhetorical point you are making.
I think part of whywhywhywhy's point was that many (though likely not all) of the negative externalities of meat consumption could be fixed by taxing them and raising the price of the burger, without outright banning it
Right, and if that's what they meant, I honestly don't think it's that bad of an idea. One of the objections here is that it shouldn't be a luxury for the rich which, well fine, channel it all through a redistributive system then.
Though I suspect cheap lab grown meat (absent some reactionary political backlash like we've seen in Florida) can make it cheap and accessible to everyone and possibly bypass the concerns about antibiotics.
When bears, badgers and raccoons start factory farming and training bacteria to have antibiotic resistance, we can talk about those.
And if and when they do, our response would be to consider interventions, not to treat it as a reason to disengage from the problem of antibiotic resistance.
Many people accept that swimming in polluted area is a bad idea and that they will have either to move to another pond or just not swim at all. So why can't we just accept that eating (way) too much meat is not good...
Since people’s behavior in these cases is different (as you say) perhaps “we” should instead accept that the situations are different enough to merit different behavior?
Trying to read them as charitably as I can, I think they are suggesting they're okay with moving away from destructive practices that make red meat so cheap and paying the higher cost that comes with it.
Do you know how many animals are killed farming a wheat field? We used to have to purge colonies of prairie dogs each spring in order to plant. Then there are the birds that get caught in the harvesters and the insects killed by the pesticides. It’s a horror show either way.
Be honest about the timescale, I understand why climate activists use the "10 years" timeline because its hard for people to care about something beyond that and the idea that we need to panic about it to enact mass change but I think anyone can thinking critically for even a moment can see nothing will have significantly changed in 10-15 years on this matter.
Personally I think lying about the timeline just gives ammunition to climate denialists because each time it's rolled out it creates a data point a denier can point at and say "look nothing happened".
Realistically if this is a problem it's my adult grandkids at most or great-grandkids who it would begin to impact.
As one example: 10 years ago we had winters with typical snowfall and summers that weren't constantly in the extremes. 10 years from now we'll have some other notable difference that is noticeable in everyday life, particularly given the disappearing groundwater around the globe (we can even set aside the guaranteed continued loss of biodiversity) and rising ocean temperatures.
We won't be in a post-apocalyptic hellscape in 10 years if that's your measuring stick for negative effects.
Ok so just to be clear we’ve downgraded from “you’ll have to apologize to your kids” to “Winters will be colder but not as cold as they were 210 years ago”.
To think that the only visible impact will be in 210 years just shows how uninformed you are.
From the scientific models we have, we're pretty much screwed. From the measurements we make and compare to the models, it appears like the models are optimistic.
What's sad is that people like you now say "it's not as bad as they say" and 20 years from now you'll be the first ones to say "we didn't know, why didn't they tell us?".
Doesn't really feel like a good faith engagement with the larger point, much less the specific point. I'm inclined to debate, but what's the point? The reality and impacts of what's happening are documented and easily available to those privileged enough to not feel any personal experience from what's happening in and to the world if you're ever more curious than you are right now.
It's already impacting people today. The same logic that you employ to deny that it's happening today can be used 80 years from now to deny that it's happening then: the change is too gradual for people to notice (insert quip about boiling frogs here), and the coping strategies will develop alongside.
I meant 10-15 years as in "when they are 16-20 years old and actually start to understand how fucked we are".
> Realistically if this is a problem it's my adult grandkids at most or great-grandkids who it would begin to impact.
It's already impacting us. We are measurably living in a mass extinction that is happening faster than the one of the dinosaurs.
The way it's going, GenZ (probably millenials) are more likely to die from this than from age. After having lived in global war times. Anyone in their thirties or less being anxious about their retirement are missing the bigger problem they will be facing at that age.
1) This is a collective-action problem. Stop blaming individuals for failures of the collective, it's counterproductive. The only thing that will happen is that people will entrench themselves in their current position (and might make them start voting for orange convicts whenever they can).
2) Your ire is misdirected. Whether this individual does or does not eat meat has 0.000000001% impact on the meat production industry. Your energy is much better spent advocating for policies that reduce overall meat consumption, as the GP was voicing their support for.
The person GP is responding to made it clear they’re willing to pay a premium for a burger that isn’t based on a pyramid of misery, which makes the response all the more misplaced.
There are models of agriculture that achieve better sustainability by using a small number of livestock as unskilled labor to emulate the wild environments that the plants our gene stock come from were adapted to. This will likely be the model moving forward, especially as petrochemical fertilizers get more expensive.
“Just enough” livestock will still get too old to breed or provide labor. They will still have too many babies in good weather and need to be culled in subsequent bad years. That doesn’t put T-bone steaks on everybody’s plate, but it does provide enough animal protein to approximate the traditional Asian diet of a few ounces of animal protein per day, as soup stock and a bit of variety.
The future will still have chicken soup even if burger joints go away.
Wait, what? "Stop blaming individuals who proudly say that they don't give a shit, because it's counter-productive"? Is that your point?
We're at a point where whoever thinks we're fine is totally uninformed. We're living in a mass extinction that is measurably happening faster than the one of the dinosaurs (spoiler: they disappeared). We're going for 4 degrees warming (and that's a conservative estimate), which means that half of the planet will become uninhabitable (as in, if you stay outside without life support, you die). What happens when half the planet wants to move (together with all their military force) where the other half of the planet is?
And what's the answer to that? "Hmm I think we will miraculously find a solution, in the meantime I want my burger".
Please quote the part where the parent you responded to said "I don't give a shit", or where they said "I think we will miraculously find a solution". You're tilting at straw men.
And you're in bad faith. The parent I responded to was responding to this:
> Completely agree. Reducing or getting rid of livestock animal agriculture will help with many major challenges we have today, like climate change, loss of biodiversity, animal cruelty, antimicrobial resistance. But hey, gotta have that cheap burger, huh?
They said "I don't care if it's cheap, but I want my burger".
The healthiness of dairy is about 75% propaganda from the dairy association of America.
Cheese has been with us for millennia. About half as long as we have had civilization. Other cultures (yogurt, etc) for I don’t know how long. But the fixation on milk is largely a product of oversupply.
Ehh, I don't think the problem is so much that we eat meat, it is how we produce it. Beef for example is raised primarily with alfalfa, a legume that puts nitrogen in the soil for free rather than having to turn fossil fuels into nitrogen fertilizer or spending substantial fractions of the total world's electricity generation on its production. Plus the fertilizer from the cow shit itself. Its not like we are short on land capable of growing grass, farmland utilization has been dropping for decades, a lot of those places get regular rainfall and alfalfa is nearly free to grow and harvest.
Of course getting people to learn about these things and politicians to adopt sensible policies about it is a whole other game.
the latter. people even claim to want change, but then they go about doing the same old things every day. they want others to lower their quality of life or spend more.
Sure, because people have limited bandwidth for caring about things. I wish all livestock was raised humanely, and that the cost of meat accurately reflected that actual costs to society.
But I like to eat meat, and I have lots of other things in my life to worry about; doing something to improve this situation is nowhere near the list of things I will actually have the bandwidth to work on.
> they want others to lower their quality of life or spend more.
This is the other sucky part: while we should be paying the "real" cost of meat, I don't think it's fair to make meat only affordable to those who are fairly well-off. That sounds like something out of a dystopian speculative fiction novel.
That's because many people just don't have time to take action or inform themselves, because all they care about (and rightly so) is how to bring food on the table for their kids.
Of course, this is exactly what authoritarian governments want. People who are exhausted, just poor enough but not too poor to start a revolution. People who don't have the time to read (really read, not watch TikTok videos) about important issues.
Top-tier antibiotics need to be reserved for humans. Absolutely. Obviously, overuse of any antibiotics in huge populations of humans or animals leads to bacteria evolving resistance... for a random event in a trillion, it ends up being a pretty determinstic fact, just like neutron decay.
It doesn't necessarily follow that using 2nd or 3rd tier antibiotics in limited cases in animal populations is always unwarranted, so long as we're aware of the potential for resistance and we're developing new ways to counter it. You have to play the cards you're dealt. Yes, the elimination of mass meat farming would go a long way toward preventing the adaptation of novel resistant bacteria. The situation, though, is that this type of farming will continue to happen for a long time. Regulations should prohibit the overuse of antibiotics, without completely preventing their use.
"New antibiotic that kills drug-resistant bacteria" until we freely give the recipe to developing country pharmaceutical companies with no requirement to control distribution so now this antibiotic is given for a simple cough and we're back where we started.
Antibiotic resistance is as much a political problem as a biology one.
Developing countries should absolutely get the standard set of antibiotics.
Formulas for "antibiotics of last resort" (I would consider a newly designed one in this category) should not be sent to Pharma companies of these countries, rather, the antibiotics should be pre-dosed and mailed over from a country who can maintain the integrity of the formula in a limited fashion to keep their effectiveness high so they can continue to serve patients years into the future.
It sucks, but we've watched antibiotics be abused so badly that babies are born into hospitals where they catch resistant infections nearly right after childbirth. I blame the antibiotics-for-every-cough medical practices common in some countries (I've seen this happen myself!)
Naive question here: Why can't new antibiotics be developed by just spraying fields of mushrooms or petri dishes full of fungi with antibiotic resistant bacteria and seeing which ones come up with novel ways to fight them?
Can't answer this particular question. But I remember hearing that developing new antibiotics is not very profitable - To minimize resistance building against new antibiotics, old antibiotics will be used until they are no longer working. So new antibiotics just won't sell that much for now.
About 1/8 of global deaths are due to some sort of bacterial infection, pretty close behind cancer ( 1/6 ).
However for children the number that die of infection in the UK is double that of cancer deaths - ( ~15% versus ~7% ) - and that's in an advanced economy.
Infection is a big problem.
In terms of barriers to making treatments - yes in part there is a problem with the right financial incentives - but it's not the only problem - finding molecules that simultaneously kill bacteria, won't be rapidly evolved around, and are safe to take isn't that easy. Then you have the problem of selectivity between bacteria - how many different sorts will it work with - 'good' verus 'bad' bacteria etc. Then you have the problem of being able to make the molecule at scale etc.
The good news is there is a constant bacteria on bacteria, fungus on bacteria chemical war going on - hence the paper.
> ( ~15% versus ~7% ) - and that's in an advanced economy.
There were 1,507 infection related child deaths between 1 April 2019 and 31 March 2022 (3 years); an overall rate of 4.20 deaths per 100,000 children per year. This was the equivalent of 15% of all child deaths in this period.
Overall, in 90% of the infection related deaths the child had an underlying health condition, including 68% who had a life-limiting condition (e.g., cerebral palsy), and 22% who had another underlying health condition (including prematurity). 10% had no underlying health condition.
In children where infection provided a complete and sufficient explanation of death, nearly a quarter (24%) had no underlying health condition.
We could definitely do more - one of the challenges here is that some bacteria are quite picky about where they grow - ie there a lots that don't grow on a petri dish. So not always so easy to grow side by side.
Note from the paper - they stored the soil samples for a year on growth media before testing ( to allow any compunds to build up presumably ). That doesn't sound like a fast process.
Our knowledge of what's out there is quite biased by what grows well in the lab - probably less than 1% of all bacteria will grow on an agar plate.
It’s because antibiotic resistance is a misunderstood issue. If one antibiotic doesn’t work, you move on to the next. Maintaining antibiotic resistance is energetically costly to the bacteria. If you aren’t actively selecting with that antibiotic, its resistance will be lost before long as mutants with deficient antibiotic resistance are now more fit and outcompete those with functional antibiotic resistance.
I read a fascinating paper around a decade ago that proposed, roughly speaking, to cycle through the limited set of different antibiotics that we have available in some careful order, so that as far as possible, only 1-2 are in use at any one time, ideally around the world. As soon as resistance against the incumbent antibiotic grows past a certain level, it is "benched" and replaced with the next in the sequence, with the goal being that, by the time that all other antibiotics in the sequence have been used and it's time to revisit the original one, the stresses placed on the bacterial population by the other antibiotics in the meantime have been sufficient to completely eliminate resistance to the original. This would mean that resistance to the original antibiotic the second time around would have to develop "the hard way", i.e., via novel mutations (rather than reactivation of alleles still present in the population), thus maximising the period for which it will remain effective.
Massive practical coordination problems, but I find the idea of consciously exploiting this "time dimension" really interesting.
Same goes for chemo therapy. There are many chemo therapies from 60s still being used due to the fact their patent is still owned by certain oligarchy.
> their patent is still owned by certain oligarchy.
I don’t know that it’s helpful to have such a blunt and un-nuanced take.
Theres no “certain oligarchy” that holds a single patent on "chemotherapy" as a broad concept, as it encompasses various chemical treatments for cancer. specific chemotherapy drugs and methods are patented by pharmaceutical companies and research institutions, for example:
- NanOlogy LLC: holds a patent for a method involving injecting large surface area microparticle taxanes directly into the tumor, combined with systemic delivery of immunotherapeutic agents.
- Johns Hopkins University: assigned patent rights for a method related to cancer treatment to Becton-Dickinson & Company, which then sublicensed them to Baxter.
- University of Cincinnati Clermont College: has a patent for breakthrough chemotherapy technology involving nanocarriers.
- Northeastern University: reports a patented molecule, WYC-209, that eliminates cancer cells.
It's like the claim that pharma had tripled the price of a 100 year old drug(insulin) that the inventors had sold for only $1 and were now charging $450 a month for it.
Then you dig into the claims and you find out that, the original insulin is still available, it's new formulations that have the higher cost.
>Until now, the only so-called “Walmart insulin” you could get for a lower price (roughly $25 to $35 per vial) was the older, human versions of insulin — R (or Regular) insulin, N (which is Novolin, aka NPH insulin); and a 70/30 mix of the two other types. Those formulations have been around since the early 1980s, but they work much differently and are seen as much less reliable than the analog insulins that first started appearing in the later 1990s.
https://www.healthline.com/diabetesmine/walmart-relion-novol...
But the new stuff works better, is faster acting and allows a freer lifestyle.
I agree that there is a problem with the pharma industry but lying about the problem to try and get change is not going to help the cause.
Outright "communist" states like Cuba and Venezuela no longer have sponsors, and are sanctioned by the US, so they're exempt from having to prove that their economies could conceivably generate any innovation.
Right-wing "post-democratic" states like Russia and Hungary are, by some definition, capitalist, but you see no innovation there either. Presumably someone if not you could blame America for them being unable to innovate. One could equally say that their markets aren't free, because they're fully captured and manipulated by their respective mafia/oligarchies.
Ahem. Just like the so-called communist countries are.
Then of course there's China. Where capitalism is also a plaything of the governing power. Similarly, no major drug developments have come out of there. Although we did have a fantastic example recently of how not to manage a biolab doing gain of function research.
Pray tell, which countries without free markets do anything at all? I'm not holding my breath for North Korea to cure cancer, no matter how much of their GDP is spent trying to keep their Dear Leader alive.
Blaming difficulty of problems on capitalism alone is disingenuous. There are huge scientific projects that are not profitable and still done because there is a somehow clearer path forward (ex: UKBioBank, CERN, ITER).
When I hear "{x} is not very profitable" I think people mean "we are not sure if we succeed doing {x} and it requires us to divert lots of resources from other things that we think would be more useful".
Pharma companies invest already huge amounts in drugs and many fail anyhow. Quote: "It takes 10 to 15 years and around US$1 billion to develop one successful drug. Despite these significant investments in time and money, 90% of drug candidates in clinical trials fail." (https://www.asbmb.org/asbmb-today/opinions/031222/90-of-drug...)
That quote itself seems to be disingenuous, conflating "one successful drug" which costs $1B with "drug candidates in clinical trials." Even more so when taken from context, as the next sentence in the article is
> Whether because they don’t adequately treat the condition they’re meant to target or the side effects are too strong, many drug candidates never advance to the approval stage.
And that doesn't sound "successful" at all. How much money is sunk into R&D at the point of failure is the much more relevant statistic to consider. If the pharmaceutical industry wasn't wildly profitable, they'd be investing those billions elsewhere, leaving drugs to a slow-cooking niche.
There is no claim that each drug costs 1$ billion. If you stop after 1-2 years of development you might have wasted some millions, if you stop after 3-4 years you wasted tens of millions and so on. The 10% success is still very low, because you can still fail after 10 years (potentially investing a lot)
If you are interested in the topic, for example for oncology: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle... , to quote "Failed drug development in oncology incurs substantial expense. At an industry level, an estimated $50 billion to $60 billion is spent annually on failed oncology trials."
There is no "oracle" that says invest 50 million (or 100 million or 1 billion) in X or Y and it will succeed (in pharma or other domains). And this is not exclusively because of capitalism, it is because doing some things is hard.
Bacteriophages suck. What some people never tell you is that the body treats phages as invaders and can very effectively get rid of them, they are not adapted to the human environment. These are only good for local treatments, sometimes...
Well, you actually want the body to clear things. That’s not a problem, it’s a feature. If the phage is able to target the bacteria before it is fully cleared, that’s all you need. Humans have been injected with phages and it has been shown to work. The Soviets actually did a lot of research on it, IIRC. The practical issue that is really challenging for broad phage therapy adoption is that phages are very specific to the bacteria they target. So, you can’t just get injected with any old phage and expect it to work. Instead, you need to catalog all the phages you find in a database and search for one that can target the specific bacteria the patient has been infected with. Phages are simply viruses that target bacteria. You’re awash in them all the time.
>you need to catalog all the phages you find in a database and search for one that can target the specific bacteria the patient has been infected with.
Most of the time the doctor doesn't know the exact pathogen you are infected with. He'll suspect a bacterian infection of some kind and prescribe a wide range antibiotic.
Doing what you suggest will require changing the way we do medicine. Which might not be a bad thing but requires some determination.
This is correct, it's called empiric treatment. If a patient comes in with altered mental status and neck rigidity, you don't have time to take a lumbar puncture and culture bacteria. I don't know anything about phage treatment, but from what the other commenter said, it seems like then you'd have to do some sort of PCR test as well. You simply don't have time for any of that -- your only choice is to blast them with vancomycin + ceftriaxone.
If you come into ED with GGP's symptom's, you might only have an hour to live. Hopefully for you it's bacterial and didn't pick up resistance from horizontal transference from a strep throat treatment that's trivial to culture and, while unpleasant, can wait a few hours to start treatment while the correct bacteriophage is readied.
Feels like it might be more practical to simply distribute phage therapy to a whole population targeting a known pathogen, like this year’s cold strain. Especially of the goal is just to reduce the use of antibiotics, not eliminate.
It's a good thing, unless the body clears off the phage first, leading to both reduced effectiveness and the body wasting immune resources. It does work locally, and one can probably engineer it today to work even better. But it seems to be destined to be relegated to a secondary cure. We seem to be able to keep finding new antibiotics with benefits like 'massive safety testing' or 'we know exactly how they work', or 'very easy to administer'.
that seems like a good thing. they only infect bacteria, not humans
phages are found in large quantities in mucus, where they seemingly contribute to the barrier function of mucus by preying on any bacteria that try go cross
To expand on what you wrote, the challenge with phages is that they’re highly specific to certain bacteria, in the same way that some viruses target gorillas and some target humans. We have yet to find broad spectrum phages. While humans have been saved from bacteria by phages, it requires identifying the bacteria strain, looking up appropriate phage that can target that bacteria, cultivating a dose of the phage, etc. So, yea, phages are highly effective, but there are practical challenges. As you say, antibiotics are lazy.
Ok, another naive question: Not suggesting we just eat a bunch of bacteriophages, but why wouldn't studying phage mechanisms / proteins for killing bacteria be equally useful?
I'm sure people are studying them. But as GP said, antibiotic are lazy. A doctor would much rather prescribe an antibiotic than do the work to match the specific bacterial infection with the particular phage to deal with it.
And since antibiotics still work (for now), there's not all that much money in phage research. If we do get to the point where we "run out" of antibiotics due to bacterial resistance, I imagine phage research will become a lot more attractive as a destination for research funding.
They're viruses, so they work by infecting bacteria and making the bacteria create more of itself.
Antibiotics are found by isolating a compound some i.e. fungi naturally produces. We figure out how to produce the compound and don't fill people with fungi to produce it. Bacteriophages are already the analogy to the compound itself.
So we should be investing heavily in creating and distributing all variety of bacteriophage for all our common bacterial infections. 20k deaths/year from MRSA in the USA alone, 120k infections/year in USA and many of the survivors are left with life-long complications.
We need to implement it! Steffanie Strathdee could save her husband's life because she was the director of UC San Diego’s Global Health Institute. "Regular" people deserve to live too.
It's a fantastic show, but I am not sure it touches on the commenter's point at all. The show is a take on what might happen if a panacea was actually found to exist. That's a bit different than a mere novel antibiotic. I even think the writers are pulling a lot of punch with how violent and insane Big Pharm, Governments and even independent groups would get about control over it.
Still, highly recommend people watch it. Great animation and art style, good writing and characterization, music is pretty rad and it's quite the trip at times.
I haven't watched the show, but your description just made me think about the "panacea". Virus-wise, I was obsessed with the idea of the DRACO antiviral concept for years.[0] It's really unclear why funding was pulled for it.
Then again, the idea behind "28 Days Later" was that everyone got a cancer vaccine and turned into zombies...
What makes you think there exists a way to fight that isn't harmful the host. Antibiotics work by stopping some biologicial pathway - there are only so many of those in bacteria, you can stop them at any point of course, but you have to stop it. However most of those pathways are also in other lifeforms and so stopping the pathway means you kill not only the bacteria but also human/mushroom.
We have been lucky that we have found a few pathways that are not in human (read mammals) that are in bacteria we worry about. However bacteria just finds a different pathway and odds are that is a pathway in humans and so we can't use it because it would kill humans as well.
Or try an evolutionary approach. Artificially enforce some dependency between an organisms' (fungi, bacteria) ability to kill a wide spectrum of targets, and their own continued survival. Let the organism spread on a large matrix in close contact with the targets and zap the areas where the targets are thriving; repeat until you have evolved strains that are effective in destroying the targets. Wonder if it's possible or even been tried.
Producing large quantities of drug resistant bacteria sounds at least BSL3. The principle might make sense, but one wouldn’t “spray the fields” of something like that.
I'm absolutely not educated in the world of antibiotics, but i can imagine it might be very difficult to monitor this kind of complex behaviour in a (hopefuly) very secured controlled environment.
It's much easier if you invest in observing the natural world that has had hundreds of millions of years to do the work, without the limitation of human intention.
The Amazon rainforest has evolved for at least 55 million years. It is
likely home to millions of compounds of potential medicinal value. In
just 50 years 100 million hectares, 390 billion individual trees
16,000 visible species and (estimated unknown) >100,000 types of
non-visible fungi, bacterium, microbes etc, have been destroyed. It's
why I found this wide-eyed statement in TFA particularly cringe:
The discovery shows that "there is terrifically interesting stuff
hiding in plain sight".
The main problem with development of new antibiotics is not that it requires groundbreaking new science to be invented, but that there is no business case for it. Or at least the business case for spending your R&D on anti-obesity medicine looks a lot better.
So, for those of us down here at the bottom of the karma ladder, after 5000 lines of comments about giving antibiotics to cows, which had nothing to do with the article, there is some actual discussion of the topic.
This inability to bring a product to market is in fact an artifact of the for-profit healthcare system.
Besides the obvious aspects of weight-loss and erectile-dysfunction drugs being more profitable, there is also an issue with imaginary property.
Pharma will not bring a drug to market unless they can own exclusive rights. Since this is a naturally occurring molecule, some tweak will need to be made before the chemical is eligible for a patent.
So until some company can make a custom modification, without disrupting the efficacy, it won't be considered a viable product.
> This inability to bring a product to market is in fact an artifact of the for-profit healthcare system.
If that were the only, or principal, problem then surely we would notice that single payer systems do better by demanding production of other therapies.
Large pharma is going to develop in the US, where tax dollars fund a significant portion of research, and they get exclusive ownership of the resulting product.
Single payer systems do still display advantages for the drug's users.
Surely you've heard of people in the US buying prescription meds from Canada?
By asking a drug company to develop a therapy for a specific condition and offering to pay for it? Couple that with refusing to pay for drugs that do not offer good value for society as a whole.
Yeah, someone else mentioned that as well; if the researched, mass produced and readily available antibiotic is still mostly effective and sells well, spending millions on finding and getting approval for one that would only be used in 1% of cases is not profitable.
> The ribosome is an attractive antibiotic target because bacteria don’t easily develop resistance to drugs targeting the structure, adds Lewis.
Sure they do, by the general mechanism of preventing the drug from entering the bacterium and/or pumping it back out. Bacteria have general mechanisms for removing molecules they don't need.
This molecule is a peptide, so one mechanism for developing resistance would be evolution of a specific protease. Bacteria already have enzymes for breaking peptide bonds.
It's interesting that this antibacterial molecule is created by a bacteria. So there's one bacteria that's resistant I guess. But maybe that's not a concerning type of bacteria but I hear that bacteria can transfer traits from one species to another...
Oh it's completely expected that bacteria create antibiotics - it's part of the low-level chemical warfare that bacteria carry out against each other. Plants as well are chemical factories ('secondary metabolism') that produce all sorts of crazy compounds to kill each other off, as well as insects.
Not quite. Alexander Fleming was growing cultures of staph bacteria, went away for some time, and when he came back, found one petri dish had been contaminated with fungus, and that the fungus inhibited the growth of the bacteria. It seems to be unclear where the contamination came from, but the fungus itself was already known to science at the time.
The cantaloupe is how the US production process in vats got a massive efficiency kick because the mould on the cantaloupe released significantly more penicillin than the prior one. But, this was after the initial discovery.
It's in "Florey: The Man Who Made Penicillin" by Lennard Bickel
"Researchers have discovered a new antibiotic molecule that targets a broad range of disease-causing bacteria — even strains resistant to commercial drugs — and is not toxic to human cells. [1]"
Most importantly, the use of novel antibiotics must be strictly prohibited in the animal food industry.
This is crucial because the misuse of antibiotics in livestock farming has been a major driver of antimicrobial resistance (AMR), a global health crisis. When antibiotics are overused or improperly applied in animals, bacteria can evolve to become resistant, rendering these life-saving drugs ineffective for treating infections in humans and animals alike.
It has always been a perversity that life-saving reserve antibiotics were ever permitted to prop up the grotesque machinery of the modern food industry—a system built on global-scale animal cruelty.
Yeah, like if the current US situation would tend towards food industry safety ...
Mmm why US specifically? The most overuse of livestock antibiotics is in India (and India has a lot of drug factories).
US is well known for its questionable high scale farming practices that often have no interest in any sort of animal welfare. Its one of the primary reasons for import controls across Europe for US meat products. It comes up every time the UK or EU negotiate trade deals with the US and came up extremely often during Brexit.
If those import markets were open European producers would struggle to compete with US-agri due to its sheer volume and lack of interest in animal welfare and/or disease control. The UK specifically suffered issues in the past with such issues via "Mad Cow Disease" in the 90s and has attempted to reform its practices as a consequence.
Conversely US agri still seems to ignore these existential nightmares, as most recently seen with Bird Flu and the new administration's troubling ideas with how to deal with it (e.g. the suggestion to avoid culls in order to "find resistent birds").
The US has a ton of problems with agriculture, but I find half of people's complaints about antibiotic use in US farming reaching far beyond what is actually happening in reality. I often hear people complain about antibiotics being in their milk or beef, but there are absolutely no antibiotics in your milk because a single cow on antibiotics getting its milk in a 10,000 gallon tanker will cause the entire load to be dumped, and it is tested for in every batch. As for beef, maybe once in awhile, but feeding a 1,200+ pound animal enough antibiotics for months to increase its weight that extra 5% is going to cost you nearly as much as the entire animal is worth.
Poultry is an area where it might be a bigger problem because chickens grow WAY faster than cows and they live in absolutely deplorable conditions on factory farms. Birds need to be clean to stay healthy, and they can't stay clean stacked in little tiny cages or packed into dense flocks, and so they end up dosed with antibiotics because otherwise they need like 10x or more the land/floor area to not have swaths of the herd top die from natural diseases. A cow or pig covered in shit is just a cow or a pig, cow shit is basically dirt by time it comes out the other end it is so thoroughly digested, a bird covered in shit is going to be packed with disease and parasites.
> As for beef, maybe once in awhile, but feeding a 1,200+ pound animal enough antibiotics for months to increase its weight that extra 5% is going to cost you nearly as much as the entire animal is worth.
Is this true? I can't find any source for this claim, just some old papers that suggest the number is closer to 30%, and various government sites that imply the practice is still in place around the world.
Im sure there are a few places in India and China that still do it where alfalfa is expensive while antibiotics cost pennies. But it certainly isn't happening in the US where growing grass is as close to free as anything gets but antibiotics cost a decent amount of money. A 800 pound cow is only worth around $250 pounds to a farmer, so even a 30% increase, which is far beyond optimistic, is at best going to net you $75 extra, which is not going to cover the many months worth of antibiotics it took to dose an animal that large.
This is really hilarious, India’s practices are orders of magnitudes worse.
They just don’t get the press, and no one expects better, so….
I don't think we are inporting or forced to import Indian beef or meat. Unlike the US tried tp force us to import their chlorinated chicken etc
We’re talking antibiotic abuse eh?
"Tried to force" is a funny way to say "didn't force".
EU has import controls on US meat, because of ethical reasons?!
You're joking right? There's only one reason we have those tarriffs and that's: money. To protect our own EU market.
Ethical doesn't have to mean non-functional. Like I previously highlighted the "mad cow" disease pandemic of the 90s shows that these "soft" ideas of not feeding cows beef scraps actually have functional outcomes, despite seeming ethnical at first. This is also evidenced by free-range chickens having less potential exposure to bird flu than hatchery chickens who are packed so close together that the virus can sweep through the entire facility.
Big up NYC Hit Squad. :)
the two are not unrelated. if it were purely about the money, they EU wouldn't enact any animal welfare and environmental regulations - but they do. of course they have to protect their markets now, but the question is whether the U.S. model is sustainable. china, for example, is outsourcing its pork production to the U.S. because it's deemed too toxic.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/why-is-c...
animal welfare is the least of your problems. US-agri does not give a flying shit about human welfare. That's the main problem here.
The humans aren't subject to foam depopulation and its successor: ventilation shutdown.
Jeez I lookex that one up and learned something new.
Hrrm. Learning by accident, I think. I recall news lines about the failure of ventilation causing mass deaths in the 10s of 1000s. Because they die in the vapors of their own shit, that fast, if packed so dense.
But that was about 20 years ago.
i was told not to use cedar bedding for chicks as "the smell is too strong, it suffocates them." I'll extrapolate that if cedar scent kills chicks, it isn't too far a stretch that their waste can also suffocate them, as that's actually putrid smelling, whereas cedar just smells nice.
This ventilation shut down like when they put someone with weak lungs on opiates onto a ventilator? I heard of that.
And another major problem is that these antibiotics are found in nature.
Penicillin production was revolutionized when it moved to Peoria, IL and found the famous cantelope:
https://www.pjstar.com/story/news/local/2019/04/25/peoria-pl...
really?
because of the current situation in the US...
In general I would agree, but with RFK in charge of that stuff I hope he is able to enact some change
I don't know if there's much merit in opposing antibiotic use in cattle if that position is just a small coincidental component of your broader pro-disease ideology.
And more importantly you're also just incompetent while publicly admitting you fired a bunch of people without actually being sure you wanted to.
Feels like we have a word for that: when you unnecessarily expend resources. I'm sure it'll come to me...
The people have the power. Why not millions of people are on the fucking streets every day across the US is beyond me.
The average person doesn't have capacity to care about policies that lead to the long term development of drug-resistant bacteria.
We couldn't even convince everyone to wear masks, this won't be an issue people will rise up in mass protests for... People are literally being kidnapped and thrown into detention centers without due process and there are not massive protests.
It takes a lot to make people protest, this ain't a battle for it.
> People are literally being kidnapped and thrown into detention centers without due process and there are not massive protests.
For the record, there have been (and will be more) significant protests about this [0]. Corporate media does a fantastic job of ignoring and minimizing protests they're not in favor of (because they are actually effective...).
If you're old enough to remember, think back to how the world held some of the largest anti-war protests in history back in the early 00's. Turns out, corporate media with strong financial links to defense contractors aren't much interested in covering that. At the same time reporters who took too much of an anti-war stance were literally fired... And things have gotten progressively worse with every administration since.
> Corporate media does a fantastic job of ignoring and minimizing protests they're not in favor of
Honest question: What incentives do Corporate media have to ignore these current set of protests?
I liked mandmandam's answer, but there is also the short version:
It is a bit like a barrister not asking questions they don't know the answer to. They have a vision of the world they want to promote and typically aren't going to report on anything that they aren't confident to be neutral or non-threatening to that vision.
The corporate media's main tactic is to just put their worldview to people over and over again until any dissenters either run out of energy to push back or become marginalised. These groups exist because a someone or someones with money has a vision of the world they want to promote. Otherwise there isn't enough income to make the thing tick.
> What incentives do Corporate media have to ignore these current set of protests?
I mean... How much Chomsky have you read? He'll give you a much better overview than I could. This shit isn't new. I'll have a crack at the question though:
Major networks are owned by just five or six corporations. Their boardrooms and major shareholders interlock with defense contractors, private prison giants, and border security firms that make billions from deportation policies. Have you any idea how much of our money these fucks are pulling in? ... Every protest covered legitimately threatens their shareholders' portfolios. This also goes for big tech/social media.
Networks also fear losing access to both parties, which are pushing harsh immigration policies. Kamala swore to be tougher on immigrants than Trump, and Democrats have lately been crowing that Trump is deporting fewer people than Biden did.
Any "objectivity" is a thin facade. They don't want to challenge the immigration narrative that drives ratings among their core demographic, which is such a helpful distraction from inequality, and which is driving their shareholders portfolios up.
When forced to cover protests, media employs tactical reporting: dramatically under-counting crowds, obsessively focusing on any hint of disorder, and platforming the most extreme voices while ignoring reasonable demands. The well worn playbook is designed to delegitimize, and a horrifying proportion of Americans eat that shit up and ask for seconds.
The corporate media isn't neutral, or just biased. It's complicit. These issues matter hugely to the status quo they defend, and people recognizing their own power, and what our taxes are being spent on, is a massive threat to an unfathomably evil status quo.
"The media serve the interests of state and corporate power, which are closely interlinked, framing their reporting and analysis in a manner supportive of established privilege and limiting debate and discussion accordingly." - Chomsky, Necessary Illusions, 1988 (and look how media has consolidated since then)
This is outdated. These days billionaires openly and publicly tell the owned media what to write.
Bezos, in his own words:
"I shared this note with the Washington Post team this morning:
I’m writing to let you know about a change coming to our opinion pages.
We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets. We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others. [...]"
It's true, it's not a very well kept secret. And still, even if most Americans distrust it, the vast majority of us remain wildly ignorant of just how bad our media really is.
"The general population doesn't know what's happening, and it doesn't even know that it doesn't know" - maybe even more true now than it was in 1993.
> personal liberties and free markets
Codeword for "Jeff Bezos's continued monopolistic domination of online retail and logistics at the expense of everyone else". In other words, he's doing to right-libertarians what rich billionaires always do to right-libertarians. Play them like a fiddle.
He's retired. He doesn't care about dominating retail, he's busy dating Latinas.
How many millions joined those street protest? Not saying it is a bad cause but there has not been any significant protests about it with any significant % of the popultion.
> How many millions joined those street protest?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15_February_2003_anti-war_prot...: "The British Stop the War Coalition (Stop) claimed the protest in London was the largest political demonstration in the city's history. Police estimated attendance as well in excess of 750,000 people and the BBC estimated that around a million attended."
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/feb/11/slugs-iraq-w...: "In February 2003, 1.5 million people protested in London against the looming Iraq war. They didn’t stop the conflict… but their legacy still looms large"
add in David Kelly - RIP - ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Kelly_(weapons_expert) ) and it's not a surprise that people are unconvinced that peaceful protest will achieve anything :/
> it's not a surprise that people are unconvinced that peaceful protest will achieve anything :/
Many people are unconvinced, yes... The thing is, look how hard corporate media and the yacht class work to shut it down. I think they're terrified of peaceful protest.
I think they’re scared of what the protest represents. A protest is “peaceful” as long as it wants to be; the Black Lives Matter protests showed this can change very quickly.
You meet people who are terrified by mice and spiders. Doesn't mean that they are threatened by them. I've yet to see a protest that was the decisive part of a political movement; they don't do anything. It is easier to get a message out there with a stopthewar.tld website than a protest. Websites are articulate, protests are just a mess.
You didn't link to [0].
There's like four different New Left misconceptions here.
1. Protests are effective - no they're not, this is a myth because people believed they ended the Vietnam War. If you have power and a belief in doing something, why should you care if a random stranger doesn't like it?
2. Corporate media - this comes from the idea that everything bad is because of "corporations", common with Gen X people. The only successful media right now have strong personal opinions, although frequently those are evil personal opinions, and aren't solely motivated by profits.
3. Defense contractors - this comes from the idea that since war is bad, and corporations are bad, we must be doing wars because it makes money for defense companies. This is in fact totally false - they make less money during wars because they have to make boring products that work, whereas in peace time they get contracted to make fake superweapons we think sound cool. Wars are basically unprofitable for everyone.
4. And finally, if you think everything gets worse all the time this is actually depression and you should get it checked out.
> Protests are effective - no they're not, this is a myth because people believed they ended the Vietnam War. If you have power and a belief in doing something, why should you care if a random stranger doesn't like it?
MLK's civil rights movement was one of the most effective protests in history. If you said that they're not always effective I would agree, but to say that they're not ever effective? It doesn't hold up. Even in modern times they can continue to be effective — the BLM protests were a huge personal focus¹ of Trump's at the end of his second presidency; he hated that people were protesting and blaming him, and his advisers immediately recognized the protests as politically threatening to his reelection. BLM eventually lead to wide policing reforms in many cities and states.
¹ Source: Peril by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa
The civil rights movement was effective of course, but they were very, very careful about how they did things, and iirc the public protests were part of an intentional media strategy because TV would show them doing nothing and getting attacked by police.
> BLM eventually lead to wide policing reforms in many cities and states
Did it? I mostly remember it leading to police doing work stoppages and no one noticing or being able to control them.
Like, the NYPD kidnapped de Blasio's daughter. SFPD just stopped issuing traffic tickets and hasn't restarted, and Oakland police just stopped enforcing everything, so the airport In n Out closed because literally all of their customers got their cars broken into.
There's no doubt that it lead to pushback in a lot of places, but that just highlights why people were protesting in the first place. When the police kidnap the mayor's daughter, or walk off the job in response to calls for accountability, it's not a failure of the protest but rather a failure of the institutions being protested.
Like I said, I do agree with you that there are protests which aren't effective, and there are some that are even counterproductive. BLM was successful though, it did lead to reforms: Minneapolis banned chokeholds and revised their use of force policies, New York reallocated some of its NYPD funding, Colorado and New Mexico passed police accountability laws, etc.
Anyway, I know your main point wasn't about BLM, I'm not trying to drag you into a mire over whether it was successful or not.
> the BLM protests were a huge personal focus¹ of Trump's at the end of his second presidency
(It's too late to edit now, but just for posterity's sake, I meant they were a huge personal focus of Trump's at the end of his first presidency.)
> We couldn't even convince everyone to wear masks
They couldn't even decide if they wanted us to wear masks then lied about the efficacy in the opposite direction once they got called out for lying about the efficacy.
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It took 30 years between Lenin's brother being executed by the state, and the Russian revolution. History has momentum, and the gains from the New Deal are still enough that many Americans dont feel comfortable putting their bodies on the line. People's dispositions are a function of their material reality and the reality is that most people haven't internalized the damage yet.
Also Americans have always allowed government over reach and corruption on the assumption that the AR-15 they have a pretty good grouping on at weekends is what'll solve the problem if it gets "really bad".
I call it the violence event horizon: a whole lot of people's critical thinking just stops, as though an actual war will make things so much simpler.
it took a world war for the state to weaken enough to matter...
As I look at it, rhetorically, when is the point for a US citizen where taking up arms against the US government seems less dangerous than business as usual? I’d say it’s still quite a ways off for most.
>The people have the power.
What do you picture will happen because of protests, exactly? That the administration realizes the error of its ways? Because it seems more likely to me that they would use it as an excuse to implement more autocratic measures.
Protests let people at home who are feeling alone in their frustration that there are many more people who feel like them. I also felt like you did until someone framed it that way for me.
A protest isn’t supposed to be a singular event, it’s a series of events that crescendos into a movement—and it’s the crescendo that scares the people in power.
Then, since there are more people who voted for the current administration, there can be even more powerful counter protests. Then we can have people fighting in the streets, then a civil war.
Are you really trying to say that people should not protest, unless they are the overwhelming majority or easily ignored, because their protest will (or even just might) turn into a civil war?
Civil war may be a necessary war, eventually.
Crescendoing into a movement doesn't /do/ anything. This is just self-satisfaction for the kinds of people who like protesting.
Other things like voting and getting elected do actually do something.
https://www.aeinstein.org/
This gave me something to think about. Thank you.
-as a democratic american - why bother?
-roughly half of the us populace supports the current authoritarian regime and the other half's senators and representatives are largely useless and aren't even doing what they can except for say wearing an adult diaper while giving a 25 hour speech
-I fully plan on eventually moving to canada (or elsewhere) when the time comes - much easier to move than any other option
> -I fully plan on eventually moving to canada (or elsewhere) when the time comes - much easier to move than any other option
I completely understand this sentiment but hope you don't. Things are bad, but they're not going to get better if everyone who thinks they're bad leaves. The problem with a U.S. descent is that the negative impact will hit just about anywhere you try to parachute to.
Half the voters. 36% didn’t even vote.
Sure they did. They voted that they were fine with either option.
Or did not approve of either option. No way to tell. Same result.
Those who cared voted for a third party not stayed home.
People need civics classes, or wherever people learn about their system of government, to learn that that's not a smart move.
If you don't bother to vote, then you're [almost literally] saying you're OK with whoever wins. If that wasn't your intention, you would vote for some third party that you were OK with.
It's not an opinion poll. People vote to try and get their desired outcome. If someone views their preferred minor candidate as a lost cause in electoral terms, they won't bother going to vote because it won't make any difference to the outcome. Or, worse, there isn't a single candidate on the list in their district who shares their views.
Whatever people's reasons and motivations are for not voting, the actual effect is implicit endorsement of whoever everyone else picks.
To wit: actions speak louder then words.
Boycotting votes is a legitimate political choice, especially when done in an organised manner.
It is absolutely a legitimate choice: It's a choice for "whoever wins."
No. At least go and make your vote invalid.
Are people really THAT lazy?
What we need is to start counting votes of no confidence. Until we can explicitly shoot down what the elites or representatives think is best for us, at best, voting is just a thin veneer of legitimacy over an ossifying oligarchy.
Italy's parliament had for a long time a system where you could vote "no confidence" without picking a constructive option. It did not serve them well and they abolished it eventually.
While I understand the disenchantment, just adding "none of the above" without committing to one of the offered options is not going to change a thing. You getting out on the streets and into politics is what changes things.
That is such a reductionist view as to be totally worthless. You think there are zero other reasons someone might not vote, be able to vote, or not support either candidate?
> either candidate?
There are more than two candidates. At least in theory.
That's the same as voting to let it happen.
Can you explain this logic a bit more because it genuinely confuses me, but I hear it articulated so often that I feel I must be missing something. I find it helpful to walk through the logic:
For example, it is frequently framed that there are only two (real) candidates, not voting or voting for a third party is the same thing as voting for <person I don't like>. The <person I don't like> is always Trump if you're talking to someone more on the left, and is Hilary/Biden/Kamala if talking to someone on the right, but the logic is the same (a contradiction should already be starting to be apparent). Both people are using the same logic to make the same claim, but they obviously can't both be correct.
It seems to me that the choice isn't actually binary. At least, if you insist that it is, then you must also conclude that a person actually gets two votes, because consider the following scenario:
Imagine that both major candidates (Candidate A and Candidate B) each deadlock and get 10 votes per, and a third party Candidate C gets 1 vote. I also have a vote, with the following possible outcomes:
1. I vote for Candidate A. This brings the total to A: 11, B: 10, C: 1
2. I vote for Candidate B. This brings the total to A: 10, B: 11, C: 1
If it were a binary, there wouldn't be any more possible outcomes. Yet,
3. I vote for Candidate C. This brings the total to A: 10, B: 10, C: 2
4. I abstain from voting. This brings the total to A: 10, B: 10, C: 1
All four of those outcomes are mathematically different, which doesn't seem possible if it's actually just a binary choice. If the outcome is different when I vote for Candidate B vs voting for Candidate C or not voting at all, then it seems self-evident that they are not the same thing. If I vote for A or B then they win, but if I vote C or not at all then there's a deadlock and a runoff. Clearly those are not the same thing.
This is such because the US has a First-Past-the-Post system, which encourages only two parties.
Things like Ranked Choice Voting change the dynamics. Some states have implemented this. I think AK & ME.
You'll notice that in every one of your possible outcomes there's zero chance of C ever winning. That's the reality. When it comes to presidential elections, voting for C means you throw away your chance to vote for someone who actually has a chance to win.
In theory, if massive numbers of people all voted for C then C could get more votes than A or B, but the odds of that happening are so low that it's never once happened in the entire history of the nation. The incredibly low odds of winning millions in the lottery (something that routinely happens in the US) are much better than electing a third party candidate (something that has never happened in the US).
Since only A or B ever have a chance to win, your choice is limited to only A or B if you want to have any meaningful impact on the outcome, and because of that fact your choice becomes binary: Either meaningfully participate in the election (by voting for A or B), or don't meaningfully participate in the election at all (either by not voting or by voting for C).
The system could be fixed to give C a chance at winning, but that would require the same people who benefit from our two party system to support fixing it and not many are eager to hurt their own (or their own party's) odds of getting elected.
People vote all over the world. In most countries there isn't just a binary system. Winning parties change a lot.
The calculus of voting is really simple, even when there are only 2 candidates:
> Vote for the least evil person.
That's it. If everyone did this, then candidates would skew less evil. And after some amount of time, we would not have evil candidates.
Was Harris a good candidate. Certainly not. Was she less evil than Trump? By a mile. Would we be better off with Harris? Seems like that is coming true after a mere 2+ months.
I have seen people consider the outcome is one of "candidate A wins" or "candidate B wins" (so binary). I do not fully agree, but practically it seems to be a good approximation - as in 30 years nobody reached something significant, and there was only one instance in 1872 when the 3rd candidate had more than 30% (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_third-party_and_indepe...)
Any of the supporters of "candidate A" or "candidate B" will have a vested interest to model it this way, because it can mean more votes for their candidate.
The simple fact of the matter is that 68% of eligible US voters either voted for Trump or didn't care enough to stop him even though he was upfront about what he would do and already served a disastrous term. They're all equally responsible.
Will this teach them anything? This is a very serious question and I don't know the answer. For the people who didn't vote, will they learn that voting matters? For the people who did, will they learn anything? I remember countless videos of them before the election saying "oh, he won't do that, he's just saying that to get votes" ... well, he will do that. And more. Are they ok with it??
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Do antibiotic-resistant bacteria respect borders?
No, but the tax revenue I give to the government does.
> I fully plan on eventually moving to canada
Wherever you move, presumably it won't be a place where people think like you do (or you'll soon be moving again).
> -I fully plan on eventually moving to canada
Why, so another country can fall apart because citizens throw their hands up in the air when they disagree with the other side - instead of trying to, say, change minds and fix things?
Yup, changing minds is a snap when you're dealing with a mass cult.
It does get much easier to throw up your hands and dismiss "the other side" if you dehumanize them and think of them as just a mass cult.
I actually agree that most of the people involved with politics are pretty cult-ish (especially the die-hard MAGAs), but I refuse to believe that 60 million people in the US are like that. Maybe it helps that I live in a very red area so I have regular and routine contact with a lot of people who I know voted for Trump but are generally and genuinely thoughtful and contemplative, but have different opinions/conclusions on the best solutions than I do. It strikes me as incredibly arrogant to assume that you are always right and someone else is always wrong.
Changing minds isn't easy, and it isn't fast, but it is clearly possible. Else how do you explain the shifts back and forth? Bush 41 -> Clinton -> Bush 43 -> Obama -> Trump -> Biden -> Trump? How do you explain the relatively rapid swing from opposition to support of gay marriage?
> It does get much easier to throw up your hands and dismiss "the other side" if you dehumanize them and think of them as just a mass cult.
Funnily enough, I have a harder time convincing people that they do this and that it's significantly contributing to the problem, than I do arguing against those who those people would lump in with the "mass cult"
Funny, but tragic.
Godspeed!
The discussion on here has lowered to reddit levels of yuck. But I digress- happy trails!
Americans are too busy going to work, with an increasing number of them needing more than one job just to get by. If people protest instead of working they will be fired which means they'll also lose their health insurance.
Since we're all sickened by the poisons corporations put into our food/water/air/products and by a sedentary lifestyle which has been strictly enforced from the age of 5 we wouldn't last long without health insurance. Almost all Americans are just one uncovered medical expense away from bankruptcy and/or homelessness.
Even still, there have been a huge amount of protests recently. There are protests nearly every weekend in and around major cities. All those fired government workers have a lot more time on their hands so I expect that will continue (until their prescription medications start running out anyway)
https://wtop.com/dc/2025/03/vets-protest-trump-doge-and-musk...
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/02/17/anti-t...
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/02/05/anti-t...
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/thousands-across-the-u...
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2025/04/04/hands-off-pro...
https://www.npr.org/2025/03/29/nx-s1-5343986/anti-musk-prote...
> If people protest instead of working they will be fired which means they'll also lose their health insurance.
Not protesting got Americans to this spot.
sincerely a 28 day per year paid vacation enjoyer.
Employment tied to healthcare. There's your answer.
The only benefit of health insurance purchased via employers is that you can use pre-tax income to pay for it. Otherwise, it has all the same deductibles and out of pocket maximums as policies purchased on healthcare.gov, except for government employees and some unionized businesses.
The answer is that most Americans still have pretty decent lives, and they like those in power (whether or not they are actually benefiting).
Uh, no, it's a group plan so it's cheaper.
Not necessarily. The risk profile of the group in a specific self insured business is not guaranteed to be healthier than one not part of a business.
Most states publish their approved premiums for healthcare.gov plans, and I don’t think I’ve encountered a self insured business plan with materially different premiums/deductibles/oop max.
It can be.
It often isn't, especially if you're the user using the plan.
Perhaps because they feel like they have the power and it's more often the disenfranchised who end up on the streets?
Trump administration is branded as "Republican", even though Republican icons like Reagan would be appalled by it.
In the mind of most Americans, the opposition to the Republican party is the Democratic party, which has been comparably insane lately, only a different direction.
A real opposition that the US politics needs is a kind of "common sense party" or "real needs party", but the FPTP election system, and the coasts vs "flyover states" division pushed by the forces that benefit from the "us vs them" division (most political forces) work against that. Forces like Forward Party, that sort of seem to fit the bill, are tiny.
People don't go out to streets just because; they need well-formulated ideas, some local leaders that would organize it, groups of like-minded people (online at least) that let the ideas brew and steep, etc. All this is not in a great shape now.
> Democratic party, which has been comparably insane lately, only a different direction.
How do you see the democratic party being insane in a different direction?
Nice concept of democracy you have
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Meanwhile doctors in India hand antibiotics out like candy.
Though I believe that still pales in comparison to US agricultural use. Based on some rough data sources I think the US uses about 2-3x more antibiotics on livestock than India uses on people.
The relative usage isn't even the primary issue. The surrounding conditions are. Farms are ideal breeding grounds for quite a few reasons. Add to that rather barbaric practices that can result in treatment periods dragging on quite a bit and the result isn't at all surprising.
Antibiotics are not cheap. Make it cheaper and you will see how they will use it on livestock.
There are already regulations around this. There are new ones coming. It's very easy to test for compliance.
There is also a not insignificant portion of "animal antibiotics" that people buy to use themselves because they can't afford the 6x markup on "human" antibiotics plus the doctors fees only to get the same pill made in the same factory with a slightly different label slapped on it.
Antibiotics are much cheaper there. They even prescribe it as a preventive measure.
One use of antibiotics in the cattle industry is as a way of increasing weight in livestock. It's theoretically discouraged now for that purpose now in the US, but last I looked there were large loopholes for preventative health purposes in herd management
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and those indian made antibiotics sometimes are little different in effectiveness than candy
I dread it when any generic medication I get is made in india or china since the fda doesn't meaningfully regulate/test their stuff
Is that true? Since it should not be imported / available let alone perscribed if it doesn't pass the checks. And especially in the US, a doctor wouldn't hand it out if it didn't have the right paperwork because they would be litigated out of their livelihood.
I've imported many medications directly from India via the internet and so far it has all been legit - I don't go for the cheapest source YMMV.
No.
Ranitidine was pulled from US shelves. Indians sell it online. It's the real deal.
Alldaychemist is legit, but I've only bought dermatological/beauty stuff there.
I've even bought Modafinil from some US based website that shipped from India. Customs believed it was legit and seized a few shipments. One that got through didn't do shit but maybe it's just me.
I can't speak to the truth of the claim, but I do think it worth noting that they didn't claim they received it from a US doctor.
I wouldn't be surprised if they bin the good stuff for the export market.
Routine use of antibiotics is already prohibited in EU and most developed countries.
Unfortunately, in terms of antifungals both the EU and US are still using tons of them in the context of agriculture [1] which is contributing to drug resistance of human pathogenic fungi [2].
The references below focus on Aspergillus, but there are many such example in other fungal pathogens.
[1] Impact of the use of azole fungicides, other than as human medicines, on the development of azole‐resistant Aspergillus spp. https://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/efsajournal/pub/9200
[2] Celia-Sanchez BN, Mangum B, Gómez Londoño LF, Wang C, Shuman B, Brewer MT, Momany M. Pan-azole- and multi-fungicide-resistant Aspergillus fumigatus is widespread in the United States. Appl Environ Microbiol. 2024 Apr 17;90(4):e0178223. doi: 10.1128/aem.01782-23. Epub 2024 Apr 1. PMID: 38557086; PMCID: PMC11022549.
How routine is routine ? I'm sure the agro industry will have a very broad interpretation of that...
Roughly preventative use.
The US is a lot of space and India is a lot of people and animals. More than twice the land and around three times the population of Europe.
In most EU countries it is very hard to reach a doctor in decent time unless you can afford to pay a lot.
So you can suffer for weeks with an infection and high fever because the pharmacies won't sell you antibiotics because you don't have a paper from a doctor.
In which EU country do you live? I moved twice and I never had this experience. Visits this routine can be done almost without delay, sometimes directly off the street inbetween scheduled patients.
Here in Ireland I've never had to wait more than a few hours to see a doctor to get a prescription for an infection. Can be a bit harder at the weekend but still seen the same day
Even in Hungary it is easy to reach a doctor. The difficulty is in finding a doctor who gives a damn.
Can you list some of the countries? I am curious, because in my country i can be seen within few days or call my doctor i need to. There are also consulting doctors that can be reached, if GP is not available. costs about 4 euros per visit.
Tell me about it. My kid has a chronic condition and we always have better luck being seen immediately by her ped in the US for a flair up.
Been in Portugal and Austria. Never had this issue, public doctors only.
If we have enough drugs with different mechanics bacteria can’t out evolve all of them. It becomes less of a risk.
Sure they can, by being exposed one at a time, developing resistance to each.
This is why we use “cocktails” on resistant cases now.
Kill it three different ways at once and it cannot adapt fast enough to leave dna fragments for the next microbe to pick up and continue the work.
Just as long as we don't start overusing the cocktail. Natural selection is a very powerful force, all it takes is one bacterium in a million that has resistance to all three methods to start an evolution.
Ideally you shelve several antibiotics for decades, with the goal of bacteria dropping resistance to it. Sounds like a game theory compliance nightmare though.
There may be some cost to each resistance gained, reducing the fitness of the bacteria
And there may be general resistance mechanisms that hit more than one chemical (like changes in membrane permeability and efflux pumps.) Over time, with more exposure, the costs can be expected to decline as resistance is optimized.
Ultimately resistance can evolve that kicks in only on exposure to the chemicals in question. Bacteria already do this with, say, the enzyme needed to metabolize lactose. The gene isn't expressed until lactose is present.
That's like saying we just need more nukes to deter other people with nukes from nuking us.
Antibiotics are not a deterrence because bacteria cannot be negotiated with. Similarly the concerns of fallout are minimal. The evolved resistance comes at a cost, evolving many resistances comes at many costs. There is a point where the bacteria cannot continue to evolve resistances yet remain competitive in the absence of the antibiotics.
AFAIK there is a new class of molecules specific to thwarting the resistance mechanism that makes the bacteria susceptible again in ways that cannot be out evolved. I'm looking for the general name for this technique - I do remember reading about it.
I don’t see the connection.
Routine antibiotic use in livestock has been banned in the US for a few years.
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/12/health/fda-to-phase-out-u...
Meat agriculture, as practiced in most of the world on an industrial basis with insufficient regulation, leads to pandemics, evolution of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, climate change, and air, water, and soil pollution.
> leads to pandemics
Regarding this detail, there has been only one pandemic recently and it has not been attributed to 'meat agriculture', though it may have involved wild meat.
But we can see throughout history that the prevalence of disease follows closely with societies that raise animals. That said, I think it is a poor excuse for advocating against animal husbandry. Disease will always exist and spread, but keeping livestock and pets does increase the chances of it happening a bit.
> we can see throughout history that the prevalence of disease follows closely with societies that raise animals
Assuming that's true, when was the last time it happened?
Completely agree. Reducing or getting rid of livestock animal agriculture will help with many major challenges we have today, like climate change, loss of biodiversity, animal cruelty, antimicrobial resistance. But hey, gotta have that cheap burger, huh?
We, the people, have the power to improve this situation. Call your representatives, do activism, talk to your friends about it, vote for the right candidates.
> We, the people, have the power to improve this situation. Call your representatives, do activism, talk to your friends about it, vote for the right candidates.
And stop eating meat and fish! It's insane for many reasons even if you don't care about how the animals are treated:
* Biodiversity loss: because we kill everything in the sea by fishing, and we kill everything in the fields for intensive agriculture (which is needed to feed the cattle). And because of deforestation of course. * Antibiotic-resistance: because putting so many animals (fishes or cows) together brings diseases we need to treat. * CO2 emissions: it's super inefficient, we all know it.
Not being a vegetarian in 2025 is just completely unreasonable.
We had Greta Thunberg talking to politicians, but actually I'm looking forward to when kids will ask their parents: "So you know you are killing us in so many ways, and you can't be arsed to eat less meat? Aren't you supposed to care about us?"
By this logic, having a car in 2025 is "just completely unreasonable". Taking plane in 2025 is "just completely unreasonable". Use of AC unless life threatening circumstances is "just completely unreasonable". Wasting rainwater and use drinkable water to wash your car (or yourself, actually) is "just completely unreasonable". Eating cashew/almond or other highly water intensive crops grown in a dried out area (California...) is "just completely unreasonable".
Note that apart from the rainwater one, I do none of the above, so I'm not even pleading for myself and my "way of life". I'm just showing how easy it is to boldly state that "it is obvious, we just all have to be reasonable" while, in fact, _not_ being "reasonable" yourself.
Yes! I'm not sure what the your intended upshot here is, but those absolutely would be beneficial changes in behavior and are perfectly in line with prevailing recommendations of ways behaviors need to change to mitigate the worst impacts of climate change, and related recommendations more broadly in line with environmental conservation and public health.
Far from a counterpoint, they testify to the reasonableness of the request in this instance, of stepping away from factory farming, because it belongs to a class of similar and well respected recommendations. Getting people to actually change their behavior is an important issue, and the purpose of recognizing it should be to reckon with it in a serious way rather that use it to tee up complaints about hypocrisy that seem to imply the futility of doing anything.
The thing is, I'm not arguing against the fact (yes, the fact) that doing this would beneficial. I'm saying that stating how "simple" and "reasonable" are these actions is missing the point.
Again, not a personal attack, but do you follow all of these actions (I could add more similar ones)? Do you own or use a car? Have you ever taken a flight? Went on a cruise? Ate cashews or almond milk? If so, why are you doing this? Why are you (to use the terms stated by OP), so unreasonable, unwilling to do so simple things for your children?
I'm not saying that any action is futile, but that the cost (monetary or otherwise) to take them is _vastly_ underestimated and basically swept under the rug with arguments of reasonableness and simplicity.
And, just to restate, I am not defending my own lifestyle, it's not an emotional argument to make for me.
I might have missed something, but I don't see anyone suggesting such changes are easy. If anything, I feel like I'm seeing opposite arguments, imploring people to understand that we're working against human nature.
My concern is that both sides are frustratingly obvious and are corrections in search of someone or something to be corrected. I don't think that anything you're saying is strictly wrong, but I think it's baffling to offer in this context where it seems to be a counterpoint in a room full of people who already agree with it (except for maybe that I-want-my-cheeseburgers-at-any-price guy). This is what I mean about Learned Sage comments, and I think the fix is to cover your bases with charitable interpretation.
Not sure what's your point though. I do think people will always do "some" unreasonable things, but doing all reasonable things at once and as much as we can is probably not smart so we should at least discuss it. How large should a burger be? How many times per day should you wash your car? What temperature should you use for your AC? Don't know, but if someone tells me they eat 1kg burger at each meal, they wash their car 3 times a day and they put the AC to 15 in the summer I would tell them they are not reasonable and that they can enjoy life better if they change a bit their habits.
This, I absolutely agree with. Yes, there are small things you can do which (collectively) _can_ have an impact.
I'm arguing against : "So you know you are killing us in so many ways, and you can't be arsed to eat less meat? Aren't you supposed to care about us?"
You can replace "to eat less meat" by basically a thousand different "reasonable" things. Does that mean that _literally everyone on earth_ is willingly "killing their children and not caring about them"?
I really dislike those arguments patronizing everyone. They achieve nothing -- actually quite the contrary, at _best_ they do nothing for someone who do not feel targeted, at worst they turn people against your cause. There's a difference between stating that each of us can and should take action because those are needed and saying that everyone not doing X is a child killer. If someone suggest that I should stop drinking almond milk, I would consider it. If they introduce this by telling how ashamed I should be and how my children will hate me for this -- but not for long since they will soon be dead anyway because of me -- well, maybe I'll just ignore an otherwise perfectly reasonable and fact-based suggestion.
Definitely it should not be patronizing. Presentation was so bad for various important topics (burning fossil fuels, nutrition habits, sex stuff, etc.).
Still, personally I try to let myself challenged even if the argument is patronizing. I don't want to say "I will not do X because you made a patronizing argument!". But for the cases I conclude it is actually a good idea, I will try to explain to the people making the argument "you would have convinced me easier if communicated like this".
I call this bad faith. You're right, living the way we live is unsustainable. That's why almost all species are dying, and that's not yet a consequence of global warming. Now, some things are harder to change than others, and have more or less impact.
Stopping to eat meat/fish is probably the one thing that is reasonably easy, cheap (vegetarian food is globally cheaper), and would have a huge impact.
Well, humans and other omnivores species do need the rapport of animal diet.
And raising cattle dates from the dawn of civilization. It was sustainable tens of thousands of years and suddenly became unsustainable in the last ten years?
> It was sustainable tens of thousands of years and suddenly became unsustainable in the last ten years?
You really don't have a clue how it works, do you? I'm genuinely concerned.
>Not being a vegetarian in 2025 is just completely unreasonable.
Last time I checked humans are omnivores, not herbivores.
I don't want to get ill, acquire some physical weaknesses because there are unreasonable people on the internet.
Check again. A balanced vegetarian diet is perfectly healthy.
Access to a healthy vegetarian diet is a luxury only a privileged minority can afford.
Saying things like "it's unreasonable to eat meat and fish" a very ignorant in more than one way.
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> Not being a vegetarian in 2025 is just completely unreasonable
Don’t stop there, because being a vegetarian (lacto or ovo) has a larger environmental burden too. Go vegan instead.
Sure, but it's a lot harder. If the whole world turned vegetarian, that would already be a great victory, wouldn't it?
I'm fine with the burger being expensive, just want the burger.
That's part of the problem. You wanting the burger has all these negative consequences for humans, animals and nature.
It is natural for humans to eat and desire to eat meat. You might as well criticize people for having sex drives (which clearly sometimes lead to negative outcomes), or needing to urinate, or criticizing dogs or lions for their eating of meat. I think we can and should develop alternatives and put our higher levels of intellect to use, but that isn't going to change our natures and it's not reasonable to expect large amounts of people to voluntarily choose to become monks and forsake the natural man. If you really want to fix things, developing more sustainable and healthy replacements is the way, not trying to shame them for their naturally-endowed characteristics.
At this point we're trafficking in tediously obvious truisms. This is Learned Sage Warns Powerball Not As Much After Taxes territory. I don't think anyone imploring us to change agricultural practices is unaware of these fundamentals about human nature. Presenting them in this context as if they represent a counterpoint implies that there's a fundamental futility to even trying, which I think takes the convo in the wrong direction.
> I don't think anyone imploring us to change agricultural practices is unaware of these fundamentals about human nature.
I don't disagree necessarily, but to be clear my comment was't directed at a wide audience, but rather directed at GP who did say something that to me would indicate heavily that they are either unaware of or choose not to acknowledge those fundamentals about human nature:
> You wanting the burger has all these negative consequences for humans, animals and nature.
I fully concede that I may be reading it too literally, but I don't think it's unreasonable to take what people say at face value. In fact I think that's the most reasonable thing to do as attempting to read minds over the internet quickly deteriorates conversation into talking past each other and people assuming you're lying/misrepresenting your true intentions (aka, reddit). I don't think I've interpreted their statement uncharitably either, though if I have that was inadvertent and was not my intention.
But also, my main point was more about the path to success than the tediously obvious truism. My main point is that shaming people for their nature isn't generally effective. I've seen this first-hand having grown up in a religious environment that heavily shamed sexual feelings/activity outside of marriage. The path to success (IMHO of course) is to develop palatable alternatives to meat.
>I don't think anyone imploring us to change agricultural practices
Before discovering agriculture, we were hunters gatherers. Practicing agriculture allowed human population to expand tremendously.
If you forbid agriculture, how do you wish to proceed with eugenics and euthanasia? Because not practicing agriculture will probably only allow 2% of mankind to survive.
How did you get from change to forbid?
You can't just say something is bad and expect billions of people to change their wants in order to achieve your political and moral goals.
I'm fine with the cost of a burger pricing in all these externalities, but I also don't like the idea of turning something like meat into a luxury good where only well-off people can afford it.
> but I also don't like the idea of turning something like meat into a luxury good where only well-off people can afford it.
Why is that? What are the downsides of this scenario? Genuinely curious, as I believe this has been the norm historically.
What are the downsides of taking a relatively affordable good that people enjoy and making it a luxury good for the rich only?
Is there a word that’s the opposite of “tautology”? Because this question seems like an example. It maps to “what are the downsides of decreasing quality of life for most people”.
It is about choices. You gain a certain amount of money and you can do various things with them. You can choose to eat 100 burgers I can choose to eat 100 carrots and buy a TV.
Antibiotic resistance implies "killing most of people faster" which in my book is worse than "decreasing quality of life for meat eaters".
I do eat meat occasionally, but I generally I am not able to eat all that I like each day (think: different cuisines, deserts, etc.) so maybe people just did not try enough stuff to enjoy more than one/two dishes... which in itself sounds sad to me.
>Antibiotic resistance implies "killing most of people faster"
We will always discover new drugs. Because we are smart due to animal fats we eat and our brains thrives with.
Also, why propose quiting raising cattle instead of a more careful using of the antibiotics when treating animals?
Antibiotic resistance isn't pertinent to quality of life?
It only has been a "norm" for a few thousand years during the agricultural era for the poorest of the poor, who could neither obtain hunting privileges, afford to keep their own animals, had no access to food, work or communal programs, which provided them with some meat, or there were significant famines which made the culling of livestock necessary.
Beyond that I'd argue we should strive to minimize class-based access restrictions to food rather than artificaly enforce them.
What is the downside of the scenario where only the rich can afford to own houses or land? After all historically, the rich owned the land and just allowed the poor to live there.
You can't think of a middle ground between runaway antibiotic resistance and taking away poor people's houses?
There is. Just as the GP was responding to a comment about meat availability and not just wanting to end meat consumption.
>That's part of the problem. You wanting the burger has all these negative consequences for humans, animals and nature.
I'm not seeing how that context makes your comment make more sense. I am not seeing that they were charged with any kind of unreasonable extrapolation along the lines of "wanting to end meat consumption," nor why that would create context that sets up your dichotomy.
Now it sounds like you're saying you know there was a middle ground but were saying it anyway to make some kind of rhetorical point, but I don't know what rhetorical point you are making.
>What are the downsides of this scenario?
Apart from widespread illnesses, malnutrition, physical weaknesses and reduced life expectancy?
I think part of whywhywhywhy's point was that many (though likely not all) of the negative externalities of meat consumption could be fixed by taxing them and raising the price of the burger, without outright banning it
Right, and if that's what they meant, I honestly don't think it's that bad of an idea. One of the objections here is that it shouldn't be a luxury for the rich which, well fine, channel it all through a redistributive system then.
Though I suspect cheap lab grown meat (absent some reactionary political backlash like we've seen in Florida) can make it cheap and accessible to everyone and possibly bypass the concerns about antibiotics.
I don't see any negative consequences. Humans are omnivores, humans eat meat. So are bears, badgers, raccoons, red foxes, chimpanzees, civets, pigs.
When bears, badgers and raccoons start factory farming and training bacteria to have antibiotic resistance, we can talk about those.
And if and when they do, our response would be to consider interventions, not to treat it as a reason to disengage from the problem of antibiotic resistance.
Many people accept that swimming in polluted area is a bad idea and that they will have either to move to another pond or just not swim at all. So why can't we just accept that eating (way) too much meat is not good...
Since people’s behavior in these cases is different (as you say) perhaps “we” should instead accept that the situations are different enough to merit different behavior?
Trying to read them as charitably as I can, I think they are suggesting they're okay with moving away from destructive practices that make red meat so cheap and paying the higher cost that comes with it.
Humans get fat when eating a grain based diet.
Do you know how many animals are killed farming a wheat field? We used to have to purge colonies of prairie dogs each spring in order to plant. Then there are the birds that get caught in the harvesters and the insects killed by the pesticides. It’s a horror show either way.
Please write this down and keep it. In 10-15 years from now, explain to your kids that you knew, but you proudly didn't give a shit.
Be honest about the timescale, I understand why climate activists use the "10 years" timeline because its hard for people to care about something beyond that and the idea that we need to panic about it to enact mass change but I think anyone can thinking critically for even a moment can see nothing will have significantly changed in 10-15 years on this matter.
Personally I think lying about the timeline just gives ammunition to climate denialists because each time it's rolled out it creates a data point a denier can point at and say "look nothing happened".
Realistically if this is a problem it's my adult grandkids at most or great-grandkids who it would begin to impact.
As one example: 10 years ago we had winters with typical snowfall and summers that weren't constantly in the extremes. 10 years from now we'll have some other notable difference that is noticeable in everyday life, particularly given the disappearing groundwater around the globe (we can even set aside the guaranteed continued loss of biodiversity) and rising ocean temperatures.
We won't be in a post-apocalyptic hellscape in 10 years if that's your measuring stick for negative effects.
Ok so just to be clear we’ve downgraded from “you’ll have to apologize to your kids” to “Winters will be colder but not as cold as they were 210 years ago”.
To think that the only visible impact will be in 210 years just shows how uninformed you are.
From the scientific models we have, we're pretty much screwed. From the measurements we make and compare to the models, it appears like the models are optimistic.
What's sad is that people like you now say "it's not as bad as they say" and 20 years from now you'll be the first ones to say "we didn't know, why didn't they tell us?".
Doesn't really feel like a good faith engagement with the larger point, much less the specific point. I'm inclined to debate, but what's the point? The reality and impacts of what's happening are documented and easily available to those privileged enough to not feel any personal experience from what's happening in and to the world if you're ever more curious than you are right now.
It's already impacting people today. The same logic that you employ to deny that it's happening today can be used 80 years from now to deny that it's happening then: the change is too gradual for people to notice (insert quip about boiling frogs here), and the coping strategies will develop alongside.
To be fair, in 80 years we'll probably be at 4C global warming, where half of the Earth (around the equator) will be unlivable.
I mean it's gradual up to a point, but when you can't survive anymore, it's not like you can ignore it.
> and the coping strategies will develop alongside.
Such as "drill baby, drill!" and tariffs :-).
I meant 10-15 years as in "when they are 16-20 years old and actually start to understand how fucked we are".
> Realistically if this is a problem it's my adult grandkids at most or great-grandkids who it would begin to impact.
It's already impacting us. We are measurably living in a mass extinction that is happening faster than the one of the dinosaurs.
The way it's going, GenZ (probably millenials) are more likely to die from this than from age. After having lived in global war times. Anyone in their thirties or less being anxious about their retirement are missing the bigger problem they will be facing at that age.
1) This is a collective-action problem. Stop blaming individuals for failures of the collective, it's counterproductive. The only thing that will happen is that people will entrench themselves in their current position (and might make them start voting for orange convicts whenever they can).
2) Your ire is misdirected. Whether this individual does or does not eat meat has 0.000000001% impact on the meat production industry. Your energy is much better spent advocating for policies that reduce overall meat consumption, as the GP was voicing their support for.
The person GP is responding to made it clear they’re willing to pay a premium for a burger that isn’t based on a pyramid of misery, which makes the response all the more misplaced.
There are models of agriculture that achieve better sustainability by using a small number of livestock as unskilled labor to emulate the wild environments that the plants our gene stock come from were adapted to. This will likely be the model moving forward, especially as petrochemical fertilizers get more expensive.
“Just enough” livestock will still get too old to breed or provide labor. They will still have too many babies in good weather and need to be culled in subsequent bad years. That doesn’t put T-bone steaks on everybody’s plate, but it does provide enough animal protein to approximate the traditional Asian diet of a few ounces of animal protein per day, as soup stock and a bit of variety.
The future will still have chicken soup even if burger joints go away.
Wait, what? "Stop blaming individuals who proudly say that they don't give a shit, because it's counter-productive"? Is that your point?
We're at a point where whoever thinks we're fine is totally uninformed. We're living in a mass extinction that is measurably happening faster than the one of the dinosaurs (spoiler: they disappeared). We're going for 4 degrees warming (and that's a conservative estimate), which means that half of the planet will become uninhabitable (as in, if you stay outside without life support, you die). What happens when half the planet wants to move (together with all their military force) where the other half of the planet is?
And what's the answer to that? "Hmm I think we will miraculously find a solution, in the meantime I want my burger".
Please quote the part where the parent you responded to said "I don't give a shit", or where they said "I think we will miraculously find a solution". You're tilting at straw men.
And you're in bad faith. The parent I responded to was responding to this:
> Completely agree. Reducing or getting rid of livestock animal agriculture will help with many major challenges we have today, like climate change, loss of biodiversity, animal cruelty, antimicrobial resistance. But hey, gotta have that cheap burger, huh?
They said "I don't care if it's cheap, but I want my burger".
Can you understand where I come from?
>In 10-15 years from now, explain to your kids that you knew
My kids enjoy eating meat and dairy. I hope my grandchildren will, too, because is healthy to have a well balanced diet.
The healthiness of dairy is about 75% propaganda from the dairy association of America.
Cheese has been with us for millennia. About half as long as we have had civilization. Other cultures (yogurt, etc) for I don’t know how long. But the fixation on milk is largely a product of oversupply.
Ehh, I don't think the problem is so much that we eat meat, it is how we produce it. Beef for example is raised primarily with alfalfa, a legume that puts nitrogen in the soil for free rather than having to turn fossil fuels into nitrogen fertilizer or spending substantial fractions of the total world's electricity generation on its production. Plus the fertilizer from the cow shit itself. Its not like we are short on land capable of growing grass, farmland utilization has been dropping for decades, a lot of those places get regular rainfall and alfalfa is nearly free to grow and harvest.
Of course getting people to learn about these things and politicians to adopt sensible policies about it is a whole other game.
we the people don't want change.
Are you arguing against the change itself or making the point that most people don’t care? Sorry to ask I just can’t tell.
the latter. people even claim to want change, but then they go about doing the same old things every day. they want others to lower their quality of life or spend more.
Sure, because people have limited bandwidth for caring about things. I wish all livestock was raised humanely, and that the cost of meat accurately reflected that actual costs to society.
But I like to eat meat, and I have lots of other things in my life to worry about; doing something to improve this situation is nowhere near the list of things I will actually have the bandwidth to work on.
> they want others to lower their quality of life or spend more.
This is the other sucky part: while we should be paying the "real" cost of meat, I don't think it's fair to make meat only affordable to those who are fairly well-off. That sounds like something out of a dystopian speculative fiction novel.
That's because many people just don't have time to take action or inform themselves, because all they care about (and rightly so) is how to bring food on the table for their kids.
Of course, this is exactly what authoritarian governments want. People who are exhausted, just poor enough but not too poor to start a revolution. People who don't have the time to read (really read, not watch TikTok videos) about important issues.
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> This is crucial because the misuse of antibiotics in livestock farming has been a major driver of antimicrobial resistance
Who cares ? As long as we have cheap eggs and burger patties!!!
Top-tier antibiotics need to be reserved for humans. Absolutely. Obviously, overuse of any antibiotics in huge populations of humans or animals leads to bacteria evolving resistance... for a random event in a trillion, it ends up being a pretty determinstic fact, just like neutron decay.
It doesn't necessarily follow that using 2nd or 3rd tier antibiotics in limited cases in animal populations is always unwarranted, so long as we're aware of the potential for resistance and we're developing new ways to counter it. You have to play the cards you're dealt. Yes, the elimination of mass meat farming would go a long way toward preventing the adaptation of novel resistant bacteria. The situation, though, is that this type of farming will continue to happen for a long time. Regulations should prohibit the overuse of antibiotics, without completely preventing their use.
In the 1960s a Canadian research expedition collected soil samples from Easter Island which led to the discovery of rapamycin (aka sirolimus).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sirolimus
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9634974/
(Full disclosure - spent my PhD working with macrolides including this one. It's an amazing origin story for a compound...)
The discovery of rapamycin is such a fascinating story. Radiolab covered this a few years back - I encourage everyone to give it a listen: https://radiolab.org/podcast/dirty-drug-and-ice-cream-tub
I would like to be able to listen to this but its almost like it's for 4 year olds.
The scientists looked in the soil samples
"Waaaaa why would you look in soil?? EWW!"
Anyway the compound stopped the fungus growing
"So it's sort of like it stopped time??"
Yes and it had a suppresive effect on the immune system
"So it's sort of like Elsa from Frozen it just freezes things??"
Yes, these are direct quotes from the episode, all within the first few minutes.
"New antibiotic that kills drug-resistant bacteria" until we freely give the recipe to developing country pharmaceutical companies with no requirement to control distribution so now this antibiotic is given for a simple cough and we're back where we started.
Antibiotic resistance is as much a political problem as a biology one.
Developing countries should be deprived of antibiotics, or affordable antibiotics? cui bono? That's too convenient for big pharma companies.
Developing countries should absolutely get the standard set of antibiotics.
Formulas for "antibiotics of last resort" (I would consider a newly designed one in this category) should not be sent to Pharma companies of these countries, rather, the antibiotics should be pre-dosed and mailed over from a country who can maintain the integrity of the formula in a limited fashion to keep their effectiveness high so they can continue to serve patients years into the future.
It sucks, but we've watched antibiotics be abused so badly that babies are born into hospitals where they catch resistant infections nearly right after childbirth. I blame the antibiotics-for-every-cough medical practices common in some countries (I've seen this happen myself!)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofbtepraOX4
Jesus
Naive question here: Why can't new antibiotics be developed by just spraying fields of mushrooms or petri dishes full of fungi with antibiotic resistant bacteria and seeing which ones come up with novel ways to fight them?
Can't answer this particular question. But I remember hearing that developing new antibiotics is not very profitable - To minimize resistance building against new antibiotics, old antibiotics will be used until they are no longer working. So new antibiotics just won't sell that much for now.
About 1/8 of global deaths are due to some sort of bacterial infection, pretty close behind cancer ( 1/6 ).
However for children the number that die of infection in the UK is double that of cancer deaths - ( ~15% versus ~7% ) - and that's in an advanced economy.
Infection is a big problem.
In terms of barriers to making treatments - yes in part there is a problem with the right financial incentives - but it's not the only problem - finding molecules that simultaneously kill bacteria, won't be rapidly evolved around, and are safe to take isn't that easy. Then you have the problem of selectivity between bacteria - how many different sorts will it work with - 'good' verus 'bad' bacteria etc. Then you have the problem of being able to make the molecule at scale etc.
The good news is there is a constant bacteria on bacteria, fungus on bacteria chemical war going on - hence the paper.
> Infection is a big problem.
Sanitation is the answer.
> ( ~15% versus ~7% ) - and that's in an advanced economy.
There were 1,507 infection related child deaths between 1 April 2019 and 31 March 2022 (3 years); an overall rate of 4.20 deaths per 100,000 children per year. This was the equivalent of 15% of all child deaths in this period.
Overall, in 90% of the infection related deaths the child had an underlying health condition, including 68% who had a life-limiting condition (e.g., cerebral palsy), and 22% who had another underlying health condition (including prematurity). 10% had no underlying health condition. In children where infection provided a complete and sufficient explanation of death, nearly a quarter (24%) had no underlying health condition.
Source: https://www.ncmd.info/publications/child-death-infection/#:~...
>The good news is there is a constant bacteria on bacteria, fungus on bacteria chemical war going on - hence the paper.
The question is shouldn't we explore it more?
Put dangerous bacteria in contact with other bacteria, fungi, viruses, prisons, viroids, archaea and see what kill them, how and why?
We could definitely do more - one of the challenges here is that some bacteria are quite picky about where they grow - ie there a lots that don't grow on a petri dish. So not always so easy to grow side by side.
Note from the paper - they stored the soil samples for a year on growth media before testing ( to allow any compunds to build up presumably ). That doesn't sound like a fast process.
Our knowledge of what's out there is quite biased by what grows well in the lab - probably less than 1% of all bacteria will grow on an agar plate.
There are killers in prisons, of course, but I don’t think their techniques will carry over to the microbial world!
It’s because antibiotic resistance is a misunderstood issue. If one antibiotic doesn’t work, you move on to the next. Maintaining antibiotic resistance is energetically costly to the bacteria. If you aren’t actively selecting with that antibiotic, its resistance will be lost before long as mutants with deficient antibiotic resistance are now more fit and outcompete those with functional antibiotic resistance.
I read a fascinating paper around a decade ago that proposed, roughly speaking, to cycle through the limited set of different antibiotics that we have available in some careful order, so that as far as possible, only 1-2 are in use at any one time, ideally around the world. As soon as resistance against the incumbent antibiotic grows past a certain level, it is "benched" and replaced with the next in the sequence, with the goal being that, by the time that all other antibiotics in the sequence have been used and it's time to revisit the original one, the stresses placed on the bacterial population by the other antibiotics in the meantime have been sufficient to completely eliminate resistance to the original. This would mean that resistance to the original antibiotic the second time around would have to develop "the hard way", i.e., via novel mutations (rather than reactivation of alleles still present in the population), thus maximising the period for which it will remain effective.
Massive practical coordination problems, but I find the idea of consciously exploiting this "time dimension" really interesting.
Do you have a reference for this paper?
Unfortunately not. It was a long time ago. If anyone else happens upon this paper (or another like it!) I'd appreciate them posting a link.
Same goes for chemo therapy. There are many chemo therapies from 60s still being used due to the fact their patent is still owned by certain oligarchy.
> their patent is still owned by certain oligarchy.
I don’t know that it’s helpful to have such a blunt and un-nuanced take.
Theres no “certain oligarchy” that holds a single patent on "chemotherapy" as a broad concept, as it encompasses various chemical treatments for cancer. specific chemotherapy drugs and methods are patented by pharmaceutical companies and research institutions, for example:
- NanOlogy LLC: holds a patent for a method involving injecting large surface area microparticle taxanes directly into the tumor, combined with systemic delivery of immunotherapeutic agents.
- Johns Hopkins University: assigned patent rights for a method related to cancer treatment to Becton-Dickinson & Company, which then sublicensed them to Baxter.
- University of Cincinnati Clermont College: has a patent for breakthrough chemotherapy technology involving nanocarriers.
- Northeastern University: reports a patented molecule, WYC-209, that eliminates cancer cells.
I think it's more likely that active research is on more selective treatments than just better chemo - chemo is a pretty blunt instrument.
> There are many chemo therapies from 60s still being used due to the fact their patent is still owned by certain oligarchy.
They must be making some novel improvements, though. Those original patents from the '60s are long expired by now.
They probably are.
It's like the claim that pharma had tripled the price of a 100 year old drug(insulin) that the inventors had sold for only $1 and were now charging $450 a month for it.
Then you dig into the claims and you find out that, the original insulin is still available, it's new formulations that have the higher cost.
>Until now, the only so-called “Walmart insulin” you could get for a lower price (roughly $25 to $35 per vial) was the older, human versions of insulin — R (or Regular) insulin, N (which is Novolin, aka NPH insulin); and a 70/30 mix of the two other types. Those formulations have been around since the early 1980s, but they work much differently and are seen as much less reliable than the analog insulins that first started appearing in the later 1990s. https://www.healthline.com/diabetesmine/walmart-relion-novol...
But the new stuff works better, is faster acting and allows a freer lifestyle.
I agree that there is a problem with the pharma industry but lying about the problem to try and get change is not going to help the cause.
>{x} is not very profitable
This sums up most of the problems with the late stage capitalism system we are forced to live in.
How is the research in the non-capitalist environments comparing?
Which non-capitalist environments?
When that question was more easily answered you could probably have pointed to macrophages.
Any of them, but let's preempt the arguments.
Outright "communist" states like Cuba and Venezuela no longer have sponsors, and are sanctioned by the US, so they're exempt from having to prove that their economies could conceivably generate any innovation.
Right-wing "post-democratic" states like Russia and Hungary are, by some definition, capitalist, but you see no innovation there either. Presumably someone if not you could blame America for them being unable to innovate. One could equally say that their markets aren't free, because they're fully captured and manipulated by their respective mafia/oligarchies.
Ahem. Just like the so-called communist countries are.
Then of course there's China. Where capitalism is also a plaything of the governing power. Similarly, no major drug developments have come out of there. Although we did have a fantastic example recently of how not to manage a biolab doing gain of function research.
Pray tell, which countries without free markets do anything at all? I'm not holding my breath for North Korea to cure cancer, no matter how much of their GDP is spent trying to keep their Dear Leader alive.
Blaming difficulty of problems on capitalism alone is disingenuous. There are huge scientific projects that are not profitable and still done because there is a somehow clearer path forward (ex: UKBioBank, CERN, ITER).
When I hear "{x} is not very profitable" I think people mean "we are not sure if we succeed doing {x} and it requires us to divert lots of resources from other things that we think would be more useful".
Pharma companies invest already huge amounts in drugs and many fail anyhow. Quote: "It takes 10 to 15 years and around US$1 billion to develop one successful drug. Despite these significant investments in time and money, 90% of drug candidates in clinical trials fail." (https://www.asbmb.org/asbmb-today/opinions/031222/90-of-drug...)
That quote itself seems to be disingenuous, conflating "one successful drug" which costs $1B with "drug candidates in clinical trials." Even more so when taken from context, as the next sentence in the article is
> Whether because they don’t adequately treat the condition they’re meant to target or the side effects are too strong, many drug candidates never advance to the approval stage.
And that doesn't sound "successful" at all. How much money is sunk into R&D at the point of failure is the much more relevant statistic to consider. If the pharmaceutical industry wasn't wildly profitable, they'd be investing those billions elsewhere, leaving drugs to a slow-cooking niche.
There is no claim that each drug costs 1$ billion. If you stop after 1-2 years of development you might have wasted some millions, if you stop after 3-4 years you wasted tens of millions and so on. The 10% success is still very low, because you can still fail after 10 years (potentially investing a lot)
If you are interested in the topic, for example for oncology: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle... , to quote "Failed drug development in oncology incurs substantial expense. At an industry level, an estimated $50 billion to $60 billion is spent annually on failed oncology trials."
There is no "oracle" that says invest 50 million (or 100 million or 1 billion) in X or Y and it will succeed (in pharma or other domains). And this is not exclusively because of capitalism, it is because doing some things is hard.
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It's not an either-or. There are other systems that do not lie on the same line, such as the Islamic financial system.
> Socialism would be even worse for research.
So is black and white thinking. There is more to a spectrum than both ends.
Because you'll end up finding bacteriophages and wonder why we're wasting so many lives and much money on antibiotics.
Antibiotics are lazy. Sure, some people have to die, but at least you didn't have to spend any time taking samples of the actual infection.
Bacteriophages suck. What some people never tell you is that the body treats phages as invaders and can very effectively get rid of them, they are not adapted to the human environment. These are only good for local treatments, sometimes...
Well, you actually want the body to clear things. That’s not a problem, it’s a feature. If the phage is able to target the bacteria before it is fully cleared, that’s all you need. Humans have been injected with phages and it has been shown to work. The Soviets actually did a lot of research on it, IIRC. The practical issue that is really challenging for broad phage therapy adoption is that phages are very specific to the bacteria they target. So, you can’t just get injected with any old phage and expect it to work. Instead, you need to catalog all the phages you find in a database and search for one that can target the specific bacteria the patient has been infected with. Phages are simply viruses that target bacteria. You’re awash in them all the time.
>you need to catalog all the phages you find in a database and search for one that can target the specific bacteria the patient has been infected with.
Most of the time the doctor doesn't know the exact pathogen you are infected with. He'll suspect a bacterian infection of some kind and prescribe a wide range antibiotic.
Doing what you suggest will require changing the way we do medicine. Which might not be a bad thing but requires some determination.
This is correct, it's called empiric treatment. If a patient comes in with altered mental status and neck rigidity, you don't have time to take a lumbar puncture and culture bacteria. I don't know anything about phage treatment, but from what the other commenter said, it seems like then you'd have to do some sort of PCR test as well. You simply don't have time for any of that -- your only choice is to blast them with vancomycin + ceftriaxone.
Yeah, which is why we need to stop using antibiotics for cases where we could use phage treatment.
Wait what
If you come into ED with GGP's symptom's, you might only have an hour to live. Hopefully for you it's bacterial and didn't pick up resistance from horizontal transference from a strep throat treatment that's trivial to culture and, while unpleasant, can wait a few hours to start treatment while the correct bacteriophage is readied.
Feels like it might be more practical to simply distribute phage therapy to a whole population targeting a known pathogen, like this year’s cold strain. Especially of the goal is just to reduce the use of antibiotics, not eliminate.
"Common cold" is a virus. Vaccines train your immune system to fight things.
Bacteriophages fight bacteria. They actually do the fighting. They are quickly cleared by the body, so they are useless for prevention.
It's a good thing, unless the body clears off the phage first, leading to both reduced effectiveness and the body wasting immune resources. It does work locally, and one can probably engineer it today to work even better. But it seems to be destined to be relegated to a secondary cure. We seem to be able to keep finding new antibiotics with benefits like 'massive safety testing' or 'we know exactly how they work', or 'very easy to administer'.
The really big issue is that there isn't enough money in it, there is no way to get an exclusive.
It should be promoted by governments.
that seems like a good thing. they only infect bacteria, not humans
phages are found in large quantities in mucus, where they seemingly contribute to the barrier function of mucus by preying on any bacteria that try go cross
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23690590/
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1508355112
https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/mbio.01984-19
this might be adaptable for therapeutics
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-48560-2
https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-024-07269-0
To expand on what you wrote, the challenge with phages is that they’re highly specific to certain bacteria, in the same way that some viruses target gorillas and some target humans. We have yet to find broad spectrum phages. While humans have been saved from bacteria by phages, it requires identifying the bacteria strain, looking up appropriate phage that can target that bacteria, cultivating a dose of the phage, etc. So, yea, phages are highly effective, but there are practical challenges. As you say, antibiotics are lazy.
Ok, another naive question: Not suggesting we just eat a bunch of bacteriophages, but why wouldn't studying phage mechanisms / proteins for killing bacteria be equally useful?
I'm sure people are studying them. But as GP said, antibiotic are lazy. A doctor would much rather prescribe an antibiotic than do the work to match the specific bacterial infection with the particular phage to deal with it.
And since antibiotics still work (for now), there's not all that much money in phage research. If we do get to the point where we "run out" of antibiotics due to bacterial resistance, I imagine phage research will become a lot more attractive as a destination for research funding.
They're viruses, so they work by infecting bacteria and making the bacteria create more of itself.
Antibiotics are found by isolating a compound some i.e. fungi naturally produces. We figure out how to produce the compound and don't fill people with fungi to produce it. Bacteriophages are already the analogy to the compound itself.
So we should be investing heavily in creating and distributing all variety of bacteriophage for all our common bacterial infections. 20k deaths/year from MRSA in the USA alone, 120k infections/year in USA and many of the survivors are left with life-long complications.
This is being studied. Phage research is active.
We need to implement it! Steffanie Strathdee could save her husband's life because she was the director of UC San Diego’s Global Health Institute. "Regular" people deserve to live too.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/azeenghorayshi/navy-pha...
The problem is, phages are recognized by your immune system too. They're effectively single-shot, last ditch efforts.
Thank you so much for volunteering!
May I suggest you to watch "Common Side Effects" - an very good animated series loosely based on your premises?
It's a fantastic show, but I am not sure it touches on the commenter's point at all. The show is a take on what might happen if a panacea was actually found to exist. That's a bit different than a mere novel antibiotic. I even think the writers are pulling a lot of punch with how violent and insane Big Pharm, Governments and even independent groups would get about control over it.
Still, highly recommend people watch it. Great animation and art style, good writing and characterization, music is pretty rad and it's quite the trip at times.
I haven't watched the show, but your description just made me think about the "panacea". Virus-wise, I was obsessed with the idea of the DRACO antiviral concept for years.[0] It's really unclear why funding was pulled for it.
Then again, the idea behind "28 Days Later" was that everyone got a cancer vaccine and turned into zombies...
[0] https://riderinstitute.org/discovery/
> the idea behind "28 Days Later" was that everyone got a cancer vaccine and turned into zombies
This was not in the movie at all. It was the extremely contagious "rage" virus, inadvertently released by animal rights activists.
Oops. I got mixed up. I was thinking of the virus designed to cure cancer in "I Am Legend."
What makes you think there exists a way to fight that isn't harmful the host. Antibiotics work by stopping some biologicial pathway - there are only so many of those in bacteria, you can stop them at any point of course, but you have to stop it. However most of those pathways are also in other lifeforms and so stopping the pathway means you kill not only the bacteria but also human/mushroom.
We have been lucky that we have found a few pathways that are not in human (read mammals) that are in bacteria we worry about. However bacteria just finds a different pathway and odds are that is a pathway in humans and so we can't use it because it would kill humans as well.
Or try an evolutionary approach. Artificially enforce some dependency between an organisms' (fungi, bacteria) ability to kill a wide spectrum of targets, and their own continued survival. Let the organism spread on a large matrix in close contact with the targets and zap the areas where the targets are thriving; repeat until you have evolved strains that are effective in destroying the targets. Wonder if it's possible or even been tried.
I believe there's a group [1] at the MIT Media Lab doing this. Certainly others.
[1] https://www.media.mit.edu/groups/sculpting-evolution/overvie...
Producing large quantities of drug resistant bacteria sounds at least BSL3. The principle might make sense, but one wouldn’t “spray the fields” of something like that.
I'm absolutely not educated in the world of antibiotics, but i can imagine it might be very difficult to monitor this kind of complex behaviour in a (hopefuly) very secured controlled environment.
It's much easier if you invest in observing the natural world that has had hundreds of millions of years to do the work, without the limitation of human intention.
The Amazon rainforest has evolved for at least 55 million years. It is likely home to millions of compounds of potential medicinal value. In just 50 years 100 million hectares, 390 billion individual trees 16,000 visible species and (estimated unknown) >100,000 types of non-visible fungi, bacterium, microbes etc, have been destroyed. It's why I found this wide-eyed statement in TFA particularly cringe:
Birds, mostly
There's some interesting history around scientists collecting soil samples from across the world to look for novel antibiotics.
I learned about it through this video, but there's a lot to explore beyond this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ig6ktJGTWk
The road from finding a new molecule with antibiotic properties to passing Phase 3 is... long, arduous and not worth it.
And if you do spend the $1bn to get there, you end up like Achaogen. For anyone in this field, read this teardown of Achaogen: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-024-03452-0
https://archive.is/5OyBO
The main problem with development of new antibiotics is not that it requires groundbreaking new science to be invented, but that there is no business case for it. Or at least the business case for spending your R&D on anti-obesity medicine looks a lot better.
So, for those of us down here at the bottom of the karma ladder, after 5000 lines of comments about giving antibiotics to cows, which had nothing to do with the article, there is some actual discussion of the topic.
This inability to bring a product to market is in fact an artifact of the for-profit healthcare system.
Besides the obvious aspects of weight-loss and erectile-dysfunction drugs being more profitable, there is also an issue with imaginary property.
Pharma will not bring a drug to market unless they can own exclusive rights. Since this is a naturally occurring molecule, some tweak will need to be made before the chemical is eligible for a patent.
So until some company can make a custom modification, without disrupting the efficacy, it won't be considered a viable product.
> This inability to bring a product to market is in fact an artifact of the for-profit healthcare system.
If that were the only, or principal, problem then surely we would notice that single payer systems do better by demanding production of other therapies.
How would they "demand" this?
Large pharma is going to develop in the US, where tax dollars fund a significant portion of research, and they get exclusive ownership of the resulting product.
Single payer systems do still display advantages for the drug's users.
Surely you've heard of people in the US buying prescription meds from Canada?
> How would they "demand" this?
By asking a drug company to develop a therapy for a specific condition and offering to pay for it? Couple that with refusing to pay for drugs that do not offer good value for society as a whole.
> The main problem with development of new antibiotics is ... that there is no business case for it.
It sounds like the main problem is a for-profit healthcare system.
Not entirely though. Another problem is that governments only support the big players in drug research. They take the easy simple path.
Yeah, someone else mentioned that as well; if the researched, mass produced and readily available antibiotic is still mostly effective and sells well, spending millions on finding and getting approval for one that would only be used in 1% of cases is not profitable.
Gotta love capitalism.
> The ribosome is an attractive antibiotic target because bacteria don’t easily develop resistance to drugs targeting the structure, adds Lewis.
Sure they do, by the general mechanism of preventing the drug from entering the bacterium and/or pumping it back out. Bacteria have general mechanisms for removing molecules they don't need.
This molecule is a peptide, so one mechanism for developing resistance would be evolution of a specific protease. Bacteria already have enzymes for breaking peptide bonds.
It's interesting that this antibacterial molecule is created by a bacteria. So there's one bacteria that's resistant I guess. But maybe that's not a concerning type of bacteria but I hear that bacteria can transfer traits from one species to another...
Oh it's completely expected that bacteria create antibiotics - it's part of the low-level chemical warfare that bacteria carry out against each other. Plants as well are chemical factories ('secondary metabolism') that produce all sorts of crazy compounds to kill each other off, as well as insects.
Wasn’t this how penicillin was found? On some cantaloupe sent in by an average joe?
Not quite. Alexander Fleming was growing cultures of staph bacteria, went away for some time, and when he came back, found one petri dish had been contaminated with fungus, and that the fungus inhibited the growth of the bacteria. It seems to be unclear where the contamination came from, but the fungus itself was already known to science at the time.
The cantaloupe is how the US production process in vats got a massive efficiency kick because the mould on the cantaloupe released significantly more penicillin than the prior one. But, this was after the initial discovery.
It's in "Florey: The Man Who Made Penicillin" by Lennard Bickel
Love the British humour! Read the bold heading of the first subsection.
So it only kills drug resistant bacteria that came from the technician's garden? That seems unusually specific.
>Enable Javascript and cookies to continue.
That's why I prefer Science Alert and their RSS'.
Weird, I browse with javascript and cookies disabled, and was able to read the article at nature.com.
Not too impressive if it kills bacteria from just one garden.
Amazing this is another new type of antibiotic that was discovered maybe for the last 6 months?
> New antibiotic that kills drug-resistant bacteria
But will it kill humans too?
There's lots of antibiotics out there. Most of them will kill everything, including us, and we don't want them.
People need to learn to actually read articles before writing comments. As the other commenter posted it’s literally answered in the first paragraph.
First paragraph.
"Researchers have discovered a new antibiotic molecule that targets a broad range of disease-causing bacteria — even strains resistant to commercial drugs — and is not toxic to human cells. [1]"
"[1] Jangra, M. et al. Nature https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-08723-7 (2025)."