ANTIBIOTICS: HOW A QUICK FIX LEADS TO BIG PROBLEMS!

Antibiotics: How a Quick Fix Leads to BIG Problems

April 4, 2012 | From theTrumpet.com

From medicine to the economy, treating the effect without solving the cause never works in the long run.

By Richard Palmer


We are facing “an end to modern medicine as we know it” if current trends continue, according to Dr. Margaret Chan, director general of the World Health Organization. “Things as common as strep throat or a child’s scratched knee could once again kill,” she warned in a speech in Denmark last month.

The world is quickly running out of antibiotics. Bacteria resistant to nearly all known antibiotics are multiplying. Few new antibiotics seem forthcoming. “In terms of new replacement antibiotics, the pipeline is virtually dry,” warned Dr. Chan. “The cupboard is nearly bare.”

Some of these antibiotic-resistant diseases kill half of all people they infect.

How did we reach this point? A major reason is the love of a quick fix. Rather than properly solve a problem, we like to treat the effect with antibiotics and move on.

America’s Super-bug Factories

Eighty percent of antibiotics in America are used in farm animals—not to treat humans. Why? One reason is antibiotics encourage animals to grow faster. The other is to suppress diseases.

The animals are fed the wrong food and live in cramped, unsanitary conditions. Of course they get sick easily. But rather than fix those problems, farmers routinely dose their animals with antibiotics.

“The use of antibiotics for disease prevention is only necessary because companies have chosen to raise animals using methods that make them especially susceptible to infectious diseases,” writes the Atlantic.

Scientists have warned for decades that this practice creates a perfect breading environment for antibiotic-resistant super-bugs. A constant low dose of antibiotics in a large number of animals is exactly the environment you would create if you were deliberately trying to breed super-bugs.

Last year, the Arizona-based Translational Genomics Research Institute tested 136 samples of meat from 26 grocery shops. It found high levels of Staphylococcus aureus in the meat. In 96 percent of the cases where it found staph bacteria, the staph was resistant to at least one type of antibiotic. In 52 percent, it was resistant to at least three types.

“This is one more reason to be very careful when you’re handling raw meat and poultry in the kitchen,” warned the head researcher on the study, Dr. Lance Price. “You can cook away these bacteria. But the problem is when you bring in that raw product, you almost inevitably contaminate your kitchen with these bacteria.”

The Food and Drug Administration (fda) acknowledged that routinely feeding antibiotics to animals was dangerous, but have done little about it. Last month a U.S. district court judge ordered the fda to do more, and it may eventually ban the use of antibiotics to prevent growth the way the European Union already has. But this still leaves the problem of disease prevention.

“The media’s coverage of the decision has focused on the use of antibiotics for growth promotion,” writes the Atlantic. “While ending these uses would be an important step, it would not be sufficient to end the misuse of antibiotics in industrial food animal production. As long as low doses of antibiotics may be continuously fed to food animals to prevent disease, the industrial operations that produce the majority of food animals in this country will continue to serve as giant incubators for antibiotic-resistant bacteria.”

But that’s a problem we refuse to confront. The quick fix is far too easy, until it is too late.

Human Health

Unfortunately we too often take the same approach in our own lives. Director of the Oxford Institute of Population Aging Prof. Sarah Harper warned that she saw a future where drugs aimed at tackling symptoms meant that no one would bother fixing core problems. That future, in fact, is already here.

Professor Harper contrasted the way the nations dealt with smoking with the way they are dealing with obesity—two “lifestyle epidemics.” Smoking-related deaths fell as public health initiatives persuaded people to stop smoking. Deaths related to obesity also appear to be falling, even though obesity rates are rising. Why? This time, the solution wasn’t lifestyle changes. Instead it could be that people are treating obesity with drugs. “What people are suggesting … is that maybe we’re moving to a culture where rather than having healthy lifestyles, we can actually, if you like, pop a pill,” she said.

“We have to ask if we wish our future to be one where individuals at increasingly younger ages pop pills rather than eat healthily, stop smoking, reduce alcohol, and take up exercise,” she said. “Do we want 10-year-olds popping statins?”

But it’s so much easier to take a pill than change a lifestyle.

Rather than fixing our lifestyles, we take antibiotics, only to get ill again a few months down the line.

This refusal to confront the causes of the problem takes its toll. Drugs often have terrible side effects (as Robert Morley cataloged here). Now, we could be facing the end of the usefulness of antibiotics.

From Medicine to the Economy

The fact is there is no such thing as a quick fix. Drugs cover up one symptom, but cause other problems. Antibiotics enable us to avoid confronting the cause of the problem, for a time, but they may not work much longer. Those problems we swept under the carpet could come back to sting us soon.

The same is true of the economy. The economy crashes, but rather than fix the cause of the problem—let the economy re-balance as economists like F.A. Hayek recommended—we flood the market with cheap credit. This gets rid of the symptom, but it doesn’t remove the penalty. The economy may rebound for a while—until the side effects kick in. Government debt increases drastically and we set ourselves up for a much bigger crash down the road.

We need to learn that we cannot just address the symptoms. We’re trying to break laws and get away with it.

It’s a fundamental principle: Broken law always exacts a penalty, sooner or later, whether that law be a law of health, economics or anything else.

We cannot paper over our problems for much longer. Soon we will face the consequences. •