Hacker Cinema
Hunting The Nightmare Bacteria
2013 · Film · 53 min
Directed by Rick Young
Has the age of antibiotics come to an end? From a young girl thrust onto life support in Arizona to an uncontrollable outbreak at one of the nation’s most prestigious hospitals, FRONTLINE investigates the alarming rise of a deadly type of bacteria that our modern antibiotics can’t stop.
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5 comments on Hacker News
In short, it's evolution. Bacteria develop resistance when exposed to antibiotics. They lose their effectiveness.
This will give you a decent overview of antibiotic resistance:
http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/antibiotic-resistance/en/
If you like to watch documentaries, Frontline has a few on the topic, though each show is several years old now which is an eon to pathogens
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/hunting-the-nightmare-bacteria/
(on youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gE4VzFz9PPo )
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/trouble-with-antibiotics/
For some information on the scope of the problem, I found this report useful. http://www.cdc.gov/drugresistance/threat-report-2013/
Frontline did an episode that covers resistance and the lack of new antibiotic drug development. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/hunting-the-nightmare-bacteria/
Bacteria are constantly mutating and looking for new ways to kill us. And since antibiotics are over-prescribed and being added to livestock feed as a preventive measure rather than to treat animals that are actually sick, currently available antibiotics are losing their effectiveness.
Drug companies are no longer doing research on new antibiotics, because antibiotics actually cure things and hence are not profitable. Today's drug companies are only interested in treatments that last a lifetime. Pfizer was the last drug company doing research into new antibiotics, and they closed that division because it wasn't (and wasn't going to be) profitable.
I think the fact that drug companies and medicine in general are not focused on important problems, but only on profitable problems, is a major issue we should be addressing. See the recent Frontline documentary "Hunting the Nightmare Bacteria"
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/hunting-the-nightmare-bacteria/
This is touched in the FRONTLINE documentary. See 33:40-40:00 here: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/hunting-the-nightmare-bacteria/?autoplay
Basically Pfizer, one of the last companies working on antibiotics for gram-negative bacteria, pulled out due to pressure from shareholders, because there's little money to be made here. You spend billions of dollars on creating an antibiotic, and upon its release the recommended instruction is to "use it as less as possible"? -- there's no money in that obviously, there's more money in cholesterol drugs, ADHD drugs, and other drugs you'll continue taking for a long long time.
I feel bad to steer the discussion this way -- but this it, this perfectly underscores one of the scary faults of capitalism. Everyone wants to see a nice smooth growth curve. Growth is prioritized higher than long-term stability of society. We need to fundamentally re-think this.
Watch the full FRONTLINE documentary here: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/hunting-the-nightmare-bacteria/