Saturday - August 14, 2010

The next liberal ‘Chicken Little’ government pandemic.

They (Government) tried the ‘bird flu’. They tried the ‘swine’ flu. No ‘pandemics’ actually occurred. It’s so embarrassing that the UN recently declared the ‘swine’, or H1N1, pandemic over. It never started!

But here’s the newest crisis: The era of antibiotics is coming to a close.

No. Really.

In just a couple of generations, what once appeared to be miracle medicines have been beaten into ineffectiveness by the bacteria they were designed to knock out. Once, scientists hailed the end of infectious diseases. Now, the post-antibiotic apocalypse is within sight.

Hyperbole? Unfortunately not. The highly serious journal Lancet Infectious Diseases yesterday posed the question itself over a paper revealing the rapid spread of multi-drug-resistant bacteria. “Is this the end of antibiotics?” it asked.

Doctors and scientists have not been complacent, but the paper by Professor Tim Walsh and colleagues takes the anxiety to a new level. Last September, Walsh published details of a gene he had discovered, called NDM 1, which passes easily between types of bacteria called enterobacteriaceae such as E. coli and Klebsiella pneumoniae and makes them resistant to almost all of the powerful, last-line group of antibiotics called carbapenems. Yesterday’s paper revealed that NDM 1 is widespread in India and has arrived here as a result of global travel and medical tourism for, among other things, transplants, pregnancy care and cosmetic surgery.

“In many ways, this is it,” Walsh tells me. “This is potentially the end. There are no antibiotics in the pipeline that have activity against NDM 1-producing enterobacteriaceae. We have a bleak window of maybe 10 years, where we are going to have to use the antibiotics we have very wisely, but also grapple with the reality that we have nothin

Now, we all know that some of this is true. My mother lost most of her leg to a MRSA infection she caught in the hospital. But, she’d have never gotten it if she’d taken her medicine as prescribed. If she’d done that, she’d never been in the hospital to catch MRSA. So we know there’s just enough truth to this.

What is the solution? The usual liberal solution to any problem. Can you guess?

Beyond that, there is a real need to conserve those antibiotics we have. “To me, it has many parallels with the problems of energy in economies around the world,” he says. Carbon trading was dreamed up to try to conserve oil and reduce its pollutant effects. There have now been a couple of interesting papers suggesting a Pigouvian tax – which he defines as one levied on an agent causing an environmental problem as an incentive to mitigate that problem – for antibiotics.

Like oil, he points out, antibiotic usefulness is finite. And the cost of drug resistance is not reflected in the price of the drug. “If you consider antibiotic sensitivity as a resource like oil, you want to maintain that by introducing a tax,” he says. It would be worldwide and the proceeds could fund new drug development.

I don’t understand why anyone listens to liberals. Their solution to any problem is…TAX IT!

Posted by Christopher     on 08/14/2010 at 09:41 PM   
Filed Under: • Economics • Health-Medicine • Stoopid-People •  
• Comments (10) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

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