> Another reality is there’s not much money to be made in making new antibiotics, so we saw a lot of drug companies who left the field of antibiotic development because of this combination of factors, that it was getting really hard to discover, to develop new antibiotics, and you don’t make a lot of money in selling these drugs, so the market really wasn’t there.
To me this seems like the big problem here. Antibiotic resistance is an inevitability regardless of our usage rates - there's too much selective pressure for it not to. To co-opt the Red Queen hypothesis slightly, we have to constantly be developing new antibiotics just to keep pace.
I suspect this problem will self-correct eventually, with the unfortunate side-effect that the cost of effective antibiotics will skyrocket for awhile.
That being said, we're obviously not doing ourselves any favors by dispensing them like candy, especially to the agricultural industry. It definitely encourages cycles - Effective antibiotics are rare and therefore profitable so tons of $$ goes into R&D -> Lots of new antibiotics are created -> price goes down because there's so many options/patents expire -> Overuse -> Resistance develops quickly and we're left with few effective options.
To me this seems like the big problem here. Antibiotic resistance is an inevitability regardless of our usage rates - there's too much selective pressure for it not to. To co-opt the Red Queen hypothesis slightly, we have to constantly be developing new antibiotics just to keep pace.
I suspect this problem will self-correct eventually, with the unfortunate side-effect that the cost of effective antibiotics will skyrocket for awhile.
That being said, we're obviously not doing ourselves any favors by dispensing them like candy, especially to the agricultural industry. It definitely encourages cycles - Effective antibiotics are rare and therefore profitable so tons of $$ goes into R&D -> Lots of new antibiotics are created -> price goes down because there's so many options/patents expire -> Overuse -> Resistance develops quickly and we're left with few effective options.