Realistically, most of the antibiotic resistance issues actually arise from antibiotic usage in farm animals. Turns out you get better and fatter growth if you microdose animals with antibiotics. Of course, that’s the perfect circumstance for promoting antibiotic resistance. And at the current massive scale of animal farming, antibiotic resistance spreads quickly.
But, you know, that’s an acceptable cost when you consider all the shareholder value that you create by having slightly fatter animals.
Funny thing is, antibiotic resistance is an energetically costly evolution, and studies show that as long as you drop antibiotic usage below a certain amount, evolution would actually favor deleting antibiotic resistance genes. In other words, if we stopped using antibiotics on farm animals, a large amount of antibiotic resistance would just evaporate basically overnight. Then realize that that would never happen with our current governments
TempermentalAnomaly@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Over, under, and misuse have resulted in adaptations by bacteria. Which is to say, life evolves. Its too bad, and there is still a role for antibiotics in our world, but we have to trim our use of it.