
How Bacteria Eat Penicillin - tosh
https://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/52456/title/How-Bacteria-Eat-Penicillin/
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zaarn
"Life finds a way." ~ Some dude from Jurassic Park

IMO we should ban antibiotics use for farmers in the amount they use it today
(probably overall, they shouldn't feed antibiotics just to promote growth) and
get into research for phage-therapy.

Eventually we will have to face the inevitable superbug that lives in common
desinfectant like a warm petridish. Probably already exists even.

Atleast the farmers can make more profit in the meantime.

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delbel
this whole fear "antibiotic super resistance bug" doomsday fear is narrative
is totally out of control, where now doctors are resisting prescribing totally
safe and proven penicillin based drugs, which is causing more damage then
good. The "super bug" threat is not from penicillin based resistance, but this
clarification is nowhere to be found in the mainstream media. This article and
the researchers are totally out of character with what the problem is. It's
gotten so bad that the WHO has now put out an advisory to say it is OK to
prescribe amoxicillin because people are getting really really sick from
doctors worried about this irrational fear because they believe in these lies.

~~~
pokemongoaway
Not to mention low dose antibiotics are sometimes very therapeutic. When the
effective medicines become widespread big pharma has incentive to spend as
much money marketing against them as it does to actually develop better stuff.
Antibiotics never worked against biofilms anyway - and many of the cases of
so-called evil bacteria are actually just full fledged biofilms.

~~~
Fomite
A number of antibiotics penetrate biofilms just fine:
[https://academic.oup.com/jac/article/65/9/1955/722668](https://academic.oup.com/jac/article/65/9/1955/722668)

Ciprofloxacin would be an awesome drug if it didn't promote the development of
active C. difficile infection.

~~~
pokemongoaway
"...were grown on black, polycarbonate membranes placed on tryptic soy agar
plates..." So ya, definitely not a walk in the park to eliminate the bacteria
in the biofilms of grandma's old infection! I never really got the incentive
for smart people like you to post sorts of "see, it's solved, we're so
advanced" replies online. It makes sense with technology because that is easy
to reference and prove one way or another. But implying something is solved in
biology is very often problematic, isn't it?

~~~
Fomite
Your objection doesn't really make much sense.

The description of how the biofilms were grown is precise because it's a peer-
reviewed paper. That it uses big words doesn't mean it's complex. "We grew the
biofilms on black plastic with food" is all that sentence says.

That's also _growing_ the biofilm, not penetrating it, which is what you seem
to be under the impression it's referring to.

I also didn't claim that "It's solved." Biofilms are a bitch. But claiming
that antibiotics don't work against bacteria in biofilms is _actively wrong_.
"Hey, your information is wrong, some broad spectrum antibiotics penetrate
biofilms" isn't claiming the problem is solved, just that someone has made a
factually incorrect statement.

Which is, you'll note, also why I noted that Cipro has other drawbacks. Do you
think I would have done that if I considered the problem "solved"?

To use a programmer example, if someone said "Python's 1-based indexing is a
bad idea", would you chew someone out for replying "Python is 0-indexed" and
linking to the language description?

