Antibiotic Resistance
Feb 28th, 2010 at 3:21 pm by susie Edit
It’s kind of Zen, don’t you think? The response to being overpowered is… stop fighting!
OSLO, Norway — Aker University Hospital is a dingy place to heal. The floors are streaked and scratched. A light layer of dust coats the blood pressure monitors. A faint stench of urine and bleach wafts from a pile of soiled bedsheets dropped in a corner.
Look closer, however, at a microscopic level, and this place is pristine. There is no sign of a dangerous and contagious staph infection that killed tens of thousands of patients in the most sophisticated hospitals of Europe, North America and Asia last year, soaring virtually unchecked.
The reason: Norwegians stopped taking so many drugs.
Twenty-five years ago, Norwegians were also losing their lives to this bacteria. But Norway’s public health system fought back with an aggressive program that made it the most infection-free country in the world. A key part of that program was cutting back severely on the use of antibiotics.
Now a spate of new studies from around the world prove that Norway’s model can be replicated with extraordinary success, and public health experts are saying these deaths — 19,000 in the U.S. each year alone, more than from AIDS — are unnecessary.
“It’s a very sad situation that in some places so many are dying from this, because we have shown here in Norway that Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus [MRSA] can be controlled, and with not too much effort,” said Jan Hendrik-Binder, Oslo’s MRSA medical advisor. “But you have to take it seriously, you have to give it attention and you must not give up.”
The World Health Organization says antibiotic resistance is one of the leading public health threats on the planet. A six-month investigation by The Associated Press found overuse and misuse of medicines has led to mutations in once curable diseases like tuberculosis and malaria, making them harder and in some cases impossible to treat.
I’m guessing we’re not hearing much about this in 2013 because it would cut into Big Pharma profits, and that would be wrong.
When I clicked on the link, the Miami Herald said the article was not there.
Actually, antibiotics contribute so little to Big Pharm’s bottom line that they can’t even be bothered to develop new, patentable ones. That’s one of the reasons drug resistance is as big a problem as it is.
The biggest factor in the lack of news about it is, I’d guess, that “don’t take antibiotics” is not a big, get-the-clicks story. It’s not scary or sexy or corrupt. It’s about prevention. What could be more boring than that?
The financial interest is pretty much in agribusiness — feeding animals antibiotics really does make them grow faster and fatter — but I’d be willing to bet that’s not considered gripping copy either.
I believe drug resistance can be laid in part on the shoulders of elderly GP’s, whose patients are happy to get the antibiotic prescribed over the phone by the doc. A Main Line doc has been doing this for years across three generations at least.