Antibiotic Resistance

sciencealert.com/researchers-trace-the-genes-for-antibiotic-resistance-back-to-their-source?perpetual=yes&limitstart=1

amrls.cvm.msu.edu/microbiology/molecular-basis-for-antimicrobial-resistance/acquired-resistance/acquisition-of-antimicrobial-resistance-via-horizontal-gene-transfer

www.nature.com/news/do-you-speak-virus-phages-caught-sending-chemical-messages-1.21313

www.funintel.com/contents/member/JennaFord/photos/Glass-replicas-of-viruses-f8692e.jpg

www.nature.com/nature/journal/v541/n7638/full/nature21049.html

linkedin.com/pulse/viruses-can-talk-each-other-over-killing-protecting-hosts-fritz

Because you'll be far more likely to die.
Many diseases today have a low mortality rate solely because of antibiotics and anti-viral drugs if we include viruses.

And don't take it as "oh I won't get it, it'll just be third world nations yay!" that will have fun outbreaks of XDR-TB and MRSA-tier bacteria or Spanish Flu-tier virus. What separates our healthcare from a developing nation's are two important things:
Hygiene and antibiotics. The former is only preventative. Preventative measures do wonders, but only antibiotics (and anti-virals) have the ability to cure.

You would be surprised how much people washing their hands prevents.

No extinction of course, but lifespan would decrease, a lot more people would die, often in horrible ways.
If you are comfortable with that it's only because you are somehow convinced it won't happen to you.
I just was cured from helicobacter pylori, a disease unknown until a few decades ago and that would lead me to cancer.
I don't want to live in an era like that, and neither should you.

''You would be surprised how much people washing their hands prevents''

^^^
win

''I just was cured from helicobacter pylori, a disease unknown until a few decades ago and that would lead me to cancer.
I don't want to live in an era like that, and neither should you.''

^^^
yeah

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JC_virus

''The virus is very common in the general population, infecting 70% to 90% of humans; most people acquire JCV in childhood or adolescence.[5][6][7] It is found in high concentrations in urban sewage worldwide, leading some researchers to suspect contaminated water as a typical route of infection.[8]''

''JCV can cross the blood–brain barrier into the central nervous system, where it infects oligodendrocytes and astrocytes, possibly through the 5-HT2A serotonin receptor.[13] JC viral DNA can be detected in both non-PML affected and PML-affected (see below) brain tissue.[14]

JCV found in the central nervous system of PML patients almost invariably have differences in promoter sequence to the JCV found in healthy individuals. It is thought that these differences in promoter sequence contribute to the fitness of the virus in the CNS and thus to the development of PML.[3]

Immunodeficiency or immunosuppression allows JCV to reactivate. In the brain, it causes the usually fatal progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy, or PML, by destroying oligodendrocytes. Whether this represents the reactivation of JCV within the CNS or seeding of newly reactivated JCV via blood or lymphatics is unknown.[15] Several studies since 2000 have suggested that the virus is also linked to colorectal cancer, as JCV has been found in malignant colon tumors, but these findings are still controversial.[16]''

nasty

antibodies and immunotherapy seem to be the route because small molecule drugs seem to be stagnant and life codes or whatever around it in time, whereas the immune system is adaptive or something, i think

So let me get this straight. Youre saying you cant understand why the people tasked with keeping us alive are afraid that diseases will become immune to one of the most important tools they have to keep us alive?

>how does that make it much worse off than before the invention of antibiotics?

As other anons have noted population density and the easily accessible ability to travel between continents within 24 hours would make a modern plague much scarier than the black death was. Even if that wasnt the case though, you seriously dont see what the big deal is going back to an average life expectancy of pre antibiotic medicine? "Im 38, ive lived a good life. Too bad that previously easily treatable staff infection got me" Like what the fuck. Im a pretty devout nihilist and even i find that logic rediculous.

A bacteria can't become immune to every antibiotic. It runs out of genetic memory eventually.

i wonder about arsenical antibodies and molecules, but it looks like it gets complex and it is all rather infuriating and helpless feeling. i wish aliens would help us through it beause medical work is probably some of the most nasty work there is, tial and error and people dying real bad. one gene or chromosome (i remember vaguely) with a slight variance causes some real bad mutation, and that isn't even synthetic base pairs. the people who are born joined at the head and in india with melty faces and i really don't like this world sometimes, even more than normal with people behaving the way they do, getting me down.

but that's temporary, gotta buck up, right?

go bashir (star trek), remember the episode when he tried to save the populace from a genetically engineered virus? i get frustrated thinking we don't even have that tech, and something somewhere probably has such advanced understanding and leaves us to scrap it out with the sick and dying. the phage was like HIV i think, and the idea of interstellar virus, bateria , fungi (thats' the one that worries me the most) and who knows what parasitic, ameoba or altogether alien micro organisms that aren't even viral/bacterial but literally alien, kingdoms of life, are out there. HIV jumped from chimps to humans somehow and once it did, bam. cats don't seem to pass on their variant. god knows what could switch from stellar lifeform to stellar life form. i was going to write something else but i forgot.

oh, something else (i don't remember the other thing) food crop diseases

also, the star trek episode was a deep space 9 episode and it was "The Quickening"

Are you implying that more people keel over today than in the past? Who gives a fuck if its a roided up cold

It's the same with used body armor. It won't stop a bullet in that spot, but it's better than nothing.

it dosen't matter. nowadays we have a way to map out which areas are plagued and quarantine them.

It won't be apocalyptic, it just means that westerners who have become comfortable with not being threatened by common infections will lose that comfort. It threatens every day people, that's what it's about. If you get a resistant bacterial infection, you're as good as dead in that hypothetical scenario.

But it's not even that bad, we'll just move on to refining phage therapies if we ever run out of effective antibiotics.

There is no "running out" of antibiotics. Once we have enough, infections will never be a problem again because a bacteria can't be immune to every antibiotic at the same time.

i read/saw videos (one TED talk at least) about how the ocean has trillions or trillions upon trillions of unknown viruses in a teaspoon of seawater.

ffs, I didn't say it wasn't a problem, I said it wasn't going to cause our extinction.

>hygene and antibiotics
Because methods of treatment not involving antibiotics don't exist amirite.

On a side note, MRSA has a 20-50% death rate? Damn, I thought it was non-lethal. I wrote a grade 10 essay on MRSA which I got an A+ for and I didn't even know that it could kill. I feel like an idiot, and maybe you're right.

What can we do to prevent it?

yeah buzzfeed is factual bro