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© The ConversationEngineered viruses can fight the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria
By Kevin Doxzen TEMPE, Ariz©2024 GPlusMedia Inc.
17 Comments
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Desert Tortoise
Only partially true. Much of the problem can be traced to people who do not take their antibiotics for the full term of the prescription. My wife does this and it infuriates me. She will be half way through her prescription and start to feel good, so she stops taking it. Doesn't like taking drugs, or they make her fart and have bad breath. The problem is unless you take the antibiotic for the full 7 or 10 days per the doctors orders, you don't kill all the bacteria and the ones left are the ones that are better able to withstand the antibiotic.
Raw Beer
Yes, I very much agree. I guess I should have written "misuse".
I never said antibiotics should never be used, but they are often used when not needed and misused. It is no secret that this has caused an increase in the appearance of resistant bacterial strains, we've known this for a long time.
virusrex
There is no realistic possibility the virus is artificial, all the evidence points out to a natural origin, reality is not like bad action movies.
Also, what "super-bacteria"? they are the same as before, the only difference they have is that antibiotics do not kill them anymore, but if antibiotics were not used in the first place they would be as dangerous as they are becoming now from the beginning.
Desert Tortoise
That is a weak explanation with many holes. Do you understand selective reproduction? The bacteria have indeed changed over time. The mutation that permits some strains of a given bacteria to survive in the presence of specific antibiotics may have existed for a long time, eons perhaps, but that mutation was neutral in terms of survivability. Then man changed the environment of that bacteria by introducing an anti-biotic. Most strains of the bacteria are killed by the anti-biotic but the few that possessed the mutation that allowed them to survive in the presence of the anti-biotic are also able to reproduce themselves. Since bacteria reproduce rapidly and have so many generations in a single year, over time the predominate strain of the bacteria becomes the one that survives, the one that is able to survive the anti-biotic. This is your super bacteria and, obtw, this is a classic example of how evolution works. A changing environment selects a particular trait as that trait gives the organism the ability to survive and reproduce in the face of this environmental change. It's kind of like a bear with white fur. Not such a good thing to have in an oak woodland but if the environment changes and you have an ice age, a white bear might have some survival advantages over a black or brown bear.
virusrex
Yeah, those damned vaccines, and surgeries, and antibiotics, and nutritional facts...
Well, if you want to base criticism on fantasies and impossible conspiracies you would have to accept that people don't take them seriously. Nature is perfectly capable of producing pandemics efficiently as it has done during all the time humanity has been in the world, thinking that completely expected natural development must be artificial is both under-estimating nature and over-estimating scientists.
That would be the opposite, "messing" with viruses is what let us know so much and so quickly about the pandemic, get treatments that help preventing complications and also allowed us to prepare safe and effective vaccines in less than one year. Being cautious and ethically responsible is one thing, being terrified of science is another completely different.
virusrex
That is completely mistaken and contradicts the opinion of the scientific community in general, the virus adapted in a different direction from what the scientists expected, in a much less efficient but still effective way and natural strains discovered later shared these adaptation. The fantasy based conspiracy is deeply antiscientific, explains nothing about the virus and contradicts itself. Specially obvious is how it completely fails to explain how the virus escaped the laboratory only to never produce any outbreak on the populous city of Wuhan, went to rural areas where it slowly produced cases in humans until it came "back" to the city where it produced big outbreaks. That would be enough to prove it is completely forced for political reasons and why the scientific community do not support it and the theory has been already scientifically debunked.
The NIH has collaborations with every important research institute of the world, and that has to include the place where the pathogens everybody expected to cause a new pandemic. Thinking this is suspicious is like thinking hospitals are suspicious because people die on them.
No medical or scientific organization of professionals in the world supports this fantasy, because it has no scientific basis. It is just an excuse some are trying to force onto people to increase antiscientific distrust, but has no basis on reality.
That is circular reasoning, if the ONLY thing that super-bacteria have to make them more dangerous is the resistance to antibiotics then refusing to use them (because then super-bacteria could appear!!!) would have the effect of making all bacteria super. Blaming the "medical treatments" that created them is still nonsense.
AgentX
Every time they mess with nature, it gets worse...
mikeylikesit
We’re over a year dealing with what may be an engineered virus, and scientists are begging us to let them engineer more viruses to fight the super-bacteria that their medical treatments have also created? Do they think we are stupid?
Raw Beer
No, all you have is the idea that it is possible that it could arise naturally. But the evidence indicates that it is much more likely that it came from a lab. Especially since the virus was first discovered in an area that was know for carrying out the exact research that would create such a virus. I already mentioned much of the evidence, and now we also have over two dozen congress members demanding an investigation into the US taxpayer-funded coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology:
“The NIH, unfortunately, has played a major role in supporting WIV and this treacherous research and the promotion of spurious claims dismissing the NIH-funded lab’s potential role in the COVID-19 pandemic.”
https://blog.whitecoatwaste.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/NIH-Letter-re-Wuhan-Institute-of-Virology-FINAL-Perry-Feb-2021.pdf
Raw Beer
They are "super-bacteria" because they are antibiotic resistant. Indeed, if you do not use antibiotics the non-super-bacteria would be just as deadly as the super-bacteria. But the non-super-bacteria can be easily treated with antibiotics, while the super-bacteria can't. We have such "super-bacteria" because of the overuse of antibiotics.
virusrex
But again, those "super-bacteria" are not more dangerous than the original bacteria is without antibiotic. You yourself quoted "but if antibiotics were not used in the first place they would be as dangerous as they are becoming now from the beginning." which defeat completely your clarification as unnecessary, the original comment is using the term as if antibiotic use increased the pathogenicity of the bacteria independently of their antibiotic resistance, which is still mistaken.
virusrex
You explanation contradicts nothing about what I wrote. It just say the same in more words.
Read again the comment the quote was directed at, it was criticizing the use of antibiotics because of the production of "super-bacteria". This makes no sense.
Obviously bacteria adapt to the use of antibiotics and eventually are able to survive it (when used wrong). But that doesn't make them any more deadly than the original bacteria once you take antibiotics out of the picture.
More simply, if you eliminate the use of antibiotics so you can avoid producing resistant strains (as the original comment implied) then the situation you end up is equivalent to having every bacteria becoming super-bacteria.
They do not produce more toxins, they don't have a special facility to infect, nor evade the immune system, the only advantage they get is to resist antibiotics, but since you are not using antibiotics anymore (because they go "against nature") then every bacteria gets that advantage.
Penfold
Stop the world I wanna get off !
Sven Asai
Yes, engineered viruses can anything, like the one we all know now, from those gain-in-function researchers in Wuhan, still setting the whole world under panic, life threat and economic consequences. Please, stop it, you pseudo-scientists and morons, don’t open the next Pandora’s boxes in your pipeline!!!
Raw Beer
No!!!! What COVID-19 has taught us is that we should not be messing around with viruses.
SandyBeachHeaven
Virus Ex is correct and the comments above him show how ignorant people can be. We need science and we need smart people to help us survive and stay on this planet until other smart people eventually find a way for us to go explore the universe and spread our biological seed in a peaceful way.
Besides, who does not like Crisps?