Soon, Antibiotics Won’t Work

It’s estimated that more people will die from bacterial infections than from cancer by 2050. Two disparate factors are driving this. First, scientists in China say they’ve identified a gene that makes common, dangerous bacteria resistant to “last-resort” antibiotics called polymyxins. The mutated gene, called mcr-1, was found in the Enterobacteriaceae germ in both pigs and people in South China, according to a report published in The Lancet.

Study author Jian-Hua Liu, a professor at South China Agricultural University in Guangzhou, China, said:

The polymyxins (colistin and polymyxin B) were the last class of antibiotics in which resistance was incapable of spreading from cell to cell…

The new gene was found on mobile forms of DNA that are easily copied and transferred between different bacteria. According to the researchers, this suggests a much greater potential for the gene to spread and diversify in different types of bacteria.

Liu went on to say that the discovery points to the emergence of a gene which can create multidrug resistance that:

is readily passed between common bacteria, including E. coli and the Klebsiella pneumoniae germ, which can cause deadly pneumonias or bloodstream infections.

We have all heard that extensive use of antibiotics in agriculture may contribute to this resistance gene. Liu’s team said that pigs were more likely than people to have bacteria with mcr-1 gene-related colistin resistance. That suggests that the resistance originated in animals and then spread to people.

The discovery bodes ill for public health worldwide. Timothy Walsh, Professor at the University of Cardiff in Wales, told BBC News: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)

All the key players are now in place to make the post-antibiotic world a reality. If MCR-1 becomes global, which is a case of when not if, and the gene aligns itself with other antibiotic resistance genes, which is inevitable, then we will have very likely reached the start of the post-antibiotic era.

According to the Review on Antimicrobial Resistance, drug-resistant infections could kill an extra 10 million people across the world every year by 2050 if new antibiotics are not found. That’s 350 million people lost. By 2050, this could cost the world around $100 trillion in lost output: That’s more than the size of the current world economy, and roughly equivalent to the world losing the output of the UK economy every year, for 35 years. Here is a graphic representation of the scale of the problem:

Anti Mocrobial Resistance

The second factor driving this disaster is our Bad Corporate Citizens. There are two classes of these bad actors. The food conglomerates that feed antibiotics to animals raised for meat, so that pig farmers can make more profit, and the Big Pharma companies that spend their intellectual calories on corporate inversions (such as Pfizer is doing in its merger with Allergan) rather than on antibiotic research. As David Cox reports about drug company research:

They’re happy to sell existing antibiotics, but they’re not interested in researching and developing new ones.

Professor William Fenical at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in San Diego discovered a new antibiotic capable of attacking the bacteria MRSA, a hospital superbug. However, most large pharmaceutical companies abandoned their antibiotic programs by 1995. And even though we know that animals raised with no antibiotics are less likely to contain drug-resistant bacteria than those routinely given antibiotics, about 80% percent of antibiotics sold in the US are given to animals raised for food production.

So, we have a perfect storm brewing: To enhance corporate profits, we give antibiotics to animals, weakening the value of those antibiotics in controlling human disease. And we look the other way when the big drug companies use innovation to avoid taxes, while saying that research into new antibiotics is “too risky” for their shareholders.

Again, the strategy of big business is “privatize the gains, socialize the losses.” And maybe when you get sick, the doctor will only be able to prescribe you a pork chop.

The world needs a new capitalism. Mr. Market isn’t going to fix this.

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