A new antibiotic will kill most microbes (initially)
The surviving microbes are able to resist the antibiotic = antimicrobial resistance
Sometimes, in as little as 6 months, a new antibiotic is not longer effective
Drug companies have realized that they cannot profit from drugs with short lifetimes
Far fewer antibiotics are now coming to market
Vitamin D can help in many ways
- Vitamin D can stop an infection from occurring (microbial or viral)
- Vitamin D can reduce an infection – so less or perhaps no antibiotics will used
- Vitamin D can augment antibiotics – so less antibiotics need to be used (dose size or duration)
VitaminDWiki misc:
- Hypothesis: antibiotic resistant bacteria can be controlled with vitamin D
- Infections and low vitamin D - many studies
- Antibiotic use cut in half by elderly (over 70) after monthly 60,000 IU of vitamin D – RCT Dec 2013
- Antibiotic resistance charts by Information Is Beautiful - 2014
- Low-level antibiotics causes weight gain in mice (and most mammals) – Aug 2014
- The Antibiotic Effects of Vitamin D – 2014
- Huge increases in health problems – risk factors include Vitamin D, Antibiotics, and Roundup
- Antibiotic resistance will kill 300 million in 35 years, FDA doing nothing, UK considering wrong things – Feb 2015
- Antibiotics increased the risk of asthma by 47%, and allergies by 25% - Dec 2019
- Antibiotics and Vitamin D are associated with many of the same diseases
- Off topic: Ecoli adapts to 1000 times toxic dose of antibiotics in just 11 days – Sept 2016
- Antibiotic usage US map is very similar to obesity US map - June 2015
- 2017 update
- Off Topic: 200,000 deaths annually due to superbugs - 10,000,000 annually in 35 years – Dec 2014 BBC Chart follows
Antimicrobial Resistance: Tackling a crisis for the health and wealth of nations – 2014
Download the PDF from VitaminDWiki
The next pandemic is already here. Covid can teach us how to fight it - June 2021
Clipped from Technology Review
Growing resistance
Antibiotics date to Sir Alexander Fleming’s serendipitous discovery in 1928 that a substance excreted by mold on his laboratory plates was killing the bacteria he had cultured there. The mold was producing the raw version of penicillin, which after a decade of further research was turned into the first modern antibiotic.
Antibiotics are complex molecules that interfere with cellular reproduction in a range of ways—compounds that are made by organisms to compete with other organisms. By adopting them for human use, medicine stepped into the middle of an endless evolutionary battle in which bacteria both produced weapons against each other and developed defenses against those weapons. Fleming understood this. In 1945, three years after penicillin was first distributed to troops in World War II, he predicted that bacterial evolution—antibiotic resistance—would eventually undermine the new drugs. He said at the time that the only remedy was to use them conservatively, so that the bacterial world would be slow to adapt.
For the first few decades after penicillin’s introduction, bacterial adaptation and drug discovery leapfrogged each other, keeping antibiotics’ ability to treat infections in front of pathogens’ skill at evading them. But by the 1970s, that midcentury burst of innovation had faded. Making antibiotics is hard: the drugs have to be nontoxic to humans but lethal to bacteria, and they must use mechanisms that dangerous bacteria haven’t yet evolved defenses against. But moving from antibiotics produced in nature to synthesizing compounds in a lab was even harder.
Resistance, meanwhile, leaped ahead. Overuse in medicine, agriculture, and aquaculture spread antibiotics through the environment and allowed microbes to adapt. Between 2000 and 2015, use of the antibiotics that have been reserved for the most lethal infections almost doubled worldwide. Levels of resistance differ by organism, drug, and location, but the most comprehensive report done to date, published in June 2021 by the WHO, shows how fast the situation has changed. Among the strains of bacteria that cause urinary tract infections, one of the most common health problems on the planet, some were resistant to a common antibiotic up to 90% of the time in certain countries; more than 65% of the bacteria causing bloodstream infections and more than 30% of the bacteria causing pneumonia resist one or more treatments as well. Gonorrhea, once an easily cured infection that causes infertility if left untreated, is rapidly developing resistance to all the drugs used against it.
At the same time, resistance factors—the genes that control bacteria’s ability to protect themselves—are traveling the globe. In 2008, a man of Indian origin was diagnosed in a hospital in Sweden with a strain of bacteria carrying a gene cluster that allowed it to resist almost all existing antibiotics. In 2015, British and Chinese researchers identified a genetic element in pigs, pork in markets, and hospital patients in China that allowed bacteria to defuse a drug called colistin, known as an antibiotic of last resort for its ability to tackle the worst superbugs. Both those genetic elements, hitchhiking from one bacterium to another, have since spread worldwide.
In the face of drug development’s difficult economics, antibiotic research has not kept up. In March, the Pew Charitable Trusts assessed the global pipeline of new antibiotic compounds. Though the group found 43 somewhere in preclinical or clinical research stages, it determined that only 13 were in phase 3, only two-thirds of those would be likely to make it through to licensure—and none possessed the molecular architecture to work against pathogens that are already the most difficult to treat.
See also: Antimicrobial Resistance on web
- Will 10 Million People Die a Year due to Antimicrobial Resistance by 2050? PLOS 2016 PDF
- BEHIND THE HEADLINES: 10 MILLION DEATHS FROM ANTIMICROBIAL RESISTANCE BY 2050 (OR NOT?) Feb 2020
- "One analysis in PLoS Medicine, referring to the 10 million figure, observes: “The scenario that seems to be underlying the most often quoted line entails a sharp initial rise of current resistance rates by 40 percentage points, after which rates remain stable until 2050, and doubled infection rates.”
- Reported conceeds that it will be millions, but was unable to find documentation for 10 million deaths
- wikipedia
- Bacteria, Virus, Fungi, Parasites
- CDC chart