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Quick let's feed it to cattle by the ton
A good step, but we need to do more to address overuse of antibiotics if we want to get off this treadmill, especially for cases not relevant to life-saving medical treatment.
That's easy. Stop eating meat. The meat industry loves the stuff. It allows them to cram more animals in the same space by preventing them becoming sick and with the added bonus of gaining weight faster so faster profit.
That's just part of the problem unfortunately. The other part is overprescription, don't expect or demand to have antibiotics prescribed for every cold. And if you do get them prescribed: finish the course, instead of stopping when you think things are better and leaving a colony of (somewhat) resistant bugs alive, which now stand a much better chance of gaining dominance.
I dislike comments which are like, it’s so easy.. just do this! (Not to pick on you specifically good Lemmy-er). I respect you want to help in some fashion.
Often it was that straightforward to ‘fix’, would we be in the mess we are in? ‘Quick/easy fixes’ got us into this mess.
I believe you can’t ’so easily’ change people’s minds and hearts and opinions overnight and have suddenly everyone be hyper conscious of meat eating or whatever problem is in the crosshairs. Change takes time. Change takes courage. Change takes commitments.
I've should've added that /s after all.
Yeah, we can't legally call it soy milk so it's now soy drink on the package. And the jury is still out if a veggie burgers may be called a burger. The industry is strong.
I’m already there! Not for ethical reasons in particular, but because of my environmental values.
Or, hear me out, stop fucking overusing antibiotics as everyone and their livestock will be using this I'm sure.
Overuse in humans is far more important than overuse in livestock.
....aaaaaaand they've evolved resistance.
war...war never changes
This is not the solution. We need to be moving away from antibiotics, and drastically decreasing their use/overuse.
How common is anti biotics in your countries? Needs to be described here in Sweden and only when necessary.
Developing countries (supposedly mainly China) just keep all their livestock on them all the time.
Which is a massive petri-dish for developing antibiotic-resistant bacteria just about as fast as you can.
Thanks for calling Germany a developing country, because that's what we are in regards to livestock. We're feeding our pigs antibiotics just for the side effect of gaining more weight.
Yes, like every few years. Let's see it in action.
Unfortunately a temporary solution. But would it be possible to design an RNA or DNA virus that recognises and targets bacteria with certain antibiotics resistance genes and then lyses them or at least represses the genes in question?
CRISPR already exists. This can easily be used to target antibiotic resistance genes and there are many examples in literature of this. Plasmid and phage as vector. Easy stuff. However, cane toads and wabbits and intentional release of GMOs leaves something to be desired for gene technology regulators.
Antibiotics are the way, but require targeted combination therapy, not a doctor's gut feeling.
this post was submitted on 23 Apr 2024
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