Humans inability to effectively organize doesn’t matter to the bacteria. As a species, we have the ability to understand that what happens in impoverished areas impacts us all. The smart move would be to rethink healthcare, globally.

Otherwise, those bacteria, who can’t argue, will just relentlessly keep evolving.

I can't say if there's a plethora of drugs just waiting to be released after CT requirements are lowered, but definitely there is less of an R&D incentive currently because pts who take antimicrobials only take them temporarily and cases where you need an advanced antimicrobial to deal with an AMR case are thankfully uncommon.

Edit: I think this is the specific bill: https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/3932...

I actually think this is good since it means we postpone usage of, and thereby resistance to, any new antibiotics.

Unfortunately, antibiotics are the tragedy of the commons writ large, and we’ve been wasting them for minimal gain because even minor private benefit generally outweighs long term consequences.

Modern cities are a huge disease vector. That kind of population density lets sickness run rampant. Untreated TB has something like a 25% mortality rate, and we've already seen drug-resistant (DR) and extreme drug-resistant (XDR) strains of TB. An outbreak of TB that we have no antibiotics for would be devastating.

—-

> I actually think this is good since it means we postpone usage of, and thereby resistance to, any new antibiotics.

This is true if you use them in isolation but I thought broad spectrum antibiotics, aka many at once, is what is typical now to slow down development of resistance? In this case you’d want to develop a few new ones and deploy them in batch.

1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broad-spectrum_antibiotic

2: https://www.science.org/content/article/combining-antibiotic...

In fact Im very scared when I read that there are plans to use antibiotics "borrowed" from ants, or bees, because probably the antibiotic will be dumped by tons and become useless after 2-3 years, while all the ants or bees in the world die out.

Apart from third world countries giving antibiotics like candy, other problem are farmers, who also feed the livestock by the bucket. That's how we get bacteria resistant to everything.

The brutal reality is that new antibiotics cannot be sent to some countries, but that is very difficult to do.

Depending on the country and situation medecine can be pricy and in limited supply, wasting it away becomes a disaster in many more ways than long term resistance.

I think you mean first-world countries.

The US does spend the most and that leads to output, but that doesn't mean it's the most efficient or does the best job of prioritizing the populations best interests over political or business concerns.

The selection process of awards like the Nobel Prize is also at risk of bias given that many of the people involved in picking the winners are themselves part of the national laboratory machine.

Regardless, my point was simply that we probably have a better chance at a Swedish effort leading to less biased and more efficient research than one from the US right now. I wasn't aiming for a debate on the relative political roots or leanings of publicly funded research labs.

That said, nationalisation is sometimes the correct move as the opposite of privatisation which is also sometimes the correct move, so attaching labels like 'socialist' to it to tar the policy is not productive (just as tarring something as 'capitalist' also does not beget good thinking about policy).

Anecdotally, from two (albeit leading) microbiologists, an additional risk if the cultural one. The thinking being, if you work on a semi-marginal anti microbial, it’s less important, but nobody will protest your margins. Versus if you develop something game changing, chances are the powers that be will take it from you.

https://blockclubchicago.org/2022/01/19/center-for-covid-con...

This kind of invesment has been traditionally done by governments. But with a reduction of taxation governments do not have animore money to do this. And for private companies it makes more sense to spend that kind of money in advertisment than in developing new products.

> ensuring good prices or bounties for successful development would likely create a plethora of antimicrobials in a quite short time frame.

If one woman has a child in 9 months. How many months takes to 9 women? More money may accelerate development, but there is a limit on how much faster one can go. Give a big enough reward and you will find more corporations cheating and lobbyng to get that money without delivering any actual antimicrobials.

Public research institutions seem a very good middle ground. Give pasionate scientist funding and they will come with solutions. Give passionate CEOs money and you get the next big scam.

I’m pretty sure government tax revenue is still at or near all time highs. As the population grows there’s more and more taxes to spend for this purpose. It’s just a matter of priorities.

but so does the cost to service that growing population.

This has been the case for decades, yet we still seem to have not learned this.

This is my observation, from having seen this happen in a couple of industries, and hearing of it happening in others.

There seems to be a "sweet spot," in new money-making stuff, where real value is produced, rewards are reaped, and scamming is low.

The industry starts off with small-scale passion projects, and relatively low rewards. Virtually no scamming, but also modest financial gains, as the passion-players start to establish the infrastructure.

Then it starts to "catch on," and a more professional approach is applied. The industry starts to scale, and the first folks on the upswing start to make some good money.

Then, after that, the scale goes up exponentially, the quality of the work nosedives, the rewards pile up, and the scamming becomes more prevalent. Many of the originators fall down, because they can't adapt to the new darwinian order.

Eventually, the whole thing becomes so corrupted, that it collapses under its own weight.

Rinse and repeat.

so often people entirely disregard passion for the work when theorizing that no one would be a ceo for less than $40million.

i haven’t ever seen studies done surrounding the issue, but i’d bet far more innovation comes from people doing something because they’re passionate than it does from monetary reward.

there’s a tipping point somewhere when innovation takes a backseat to greed.

often greed directly leads to a willingness to destroy a things essence or just chip away at the thing completely ignoring the passion which brought it about in the first place.

edit: forgive me if this seems a bit heavy handed—just watched Its a Wonderful Life with the family for Christmas so maybe i’m feeling a bit jaded towards greed.

If you have reasonably honest people who are not starting from scratch, and honest trials, you likely are going to get a real thing. Case in point: mRNA vaccines against COVID.

If that is so, then that research should be done by the state. The well-being of entire human race cannot be tied to monetary incentives of profiteering.

But the space program, and maybe the Manhattan project, actually had real, credible competition, even if it wasn't economic, so maybe were able to escape the bureaucratic trap. Something less urgent (even if it is on paper) like antibiotic resistance, I'm not convinced presents the kind of competition that would actually substitute for a competitive market.

Its a gigantic counterpoint. A large swath of the technology used today was developed by NASA and then turned over to the private corporations for them to profit. Socializing the costs. Privatizing the profits.

The Internet iself an argument. It was developed at DARPA with taxpayer money. Then turned over to the private corporations so that they could profit. Another case of socialism for the corporations.

Really. With all the tax breaks and ongoing lowering of the top tax bracked for corporate profit. Even as they offshore their legal entity to dodge taxes...

Even if the capital gains taxes were 90% like back in Eisenhower era and it was actually enforced, that still wouldn't justify handing over publicly funded research to private actors to profit. Publicly funded everything should be made publicly available and usable.

Same happened with all of those. The government created the tech, then paid private corporations to implement it, literally funding the everything from scratch while the private corps grabbed the profits.

> This sped up the process of having a viable, unified internet

That's false. Chile's Socialist president was at the point of launching their Internet in mid 70s. Which was ended by the US backed coup.

The large livestock operations keep their livestock in horrible unsanitary conditions to save money and they create a breeding petry dish for bacteria. They rely on antibiotics to kill the bacteria but in those conditions the bacteria have all the advantages and usually are able to create resistant stains pretty quick.

Hypothetically if we had globally enforced cycling of a sufficient amount of antimicrobials, the problem could likely be somewhat minimised.

If you have one country with lax or no antibiotic regulations then that country is going to continue breeding antibiotic-resistant pathogens. Those pathogens will pretty much inevitably escape out to more responsible countries.

This is theoretically doable, but as it stands you can't even get every country to abide by sanctions to discourage proliferation of nuclear weapons.

It's dangerous to think such problems can just be solved by throwing money at them...