Antimicrobial resistance

This is a global problem of antibiotics, and it's recognized by everybody.

There's world congresses on antibiotic resistance.

So phage therapy, and I'm not saying we can kill everything and everything is perfect and we can cure everything, but it's absolutely something that needs to not be shoved to the side, which I've seen in the field.

Some of the gatekeepers just absolutely, it just terrifies them to even come online with us because they don't, I don't know if they don't want it or they just are trying to make sure that it's not just some charlatan thing.

So there's really interesting plant research that's going on there, and there's different botanicals, but it's interesting.

They're giving animals mixtures of probiotics and these plant extracts, Trying to see if this will help them deal with this problem of antibiotic resistance.

And the list of plants is really kind of fun.

the researchers and agricultural institutes, and there's a lot of research in this right now, the researchers and agricultural institutes that are studying several major classes of botanical feed additives, and they call them PFAs, as direct alternatives to antibiotics that are made through pharmaceutical companies.

But they're, you know, this is serious stuff.

And Yucca and Cahia, we're looking at the... saponarians the saponins in these that are used to bind ammonia and livestock which also helps the gut improving nitrogen utilization and feed conversion efficiency and then black cumin is frequently used in trials as a polyherbal powder or oil extract in poultry to stimulate natural antibody production and enhance overall growth performance and immune function.

immune challenges conditions so this is what what is happening and this is what this wonderful FAO report is more towards the economic catastrophe looming and also does you know the disease problems that are looming because of antibiotic resistance and they are talking about these botanical substitutes but what I think is interesting and I didn't read it in the report so if I'm wrong I apologize but there's not a lot of looking at well maybe mega farming is a bad idea and shoving thousands of cattle into a big pen filled with feces maybe isn't the best thing for the animals.

And all of this factory farming of every type of animal you can imagine is not a great way to raise animals.

And what that means is about 70 percent globally of medically relevant antibiotics are fed to farm animals.

It's driving antibiotic resistance, which already kills more than a million people per year.

And by 2050 is expected to be killing more than 10 million people per year, according to an article in The Lancet.

And one of the top two causes is this use of in farm animals of medically relevant antibiotics.

So when studies are done of even antibiotic free chicken, antibiotic free other meats, An organization called Farm Forward has tracked this and there still is an awful lot of antibiotics in the animals that are in the meat of animals that are labeled antibiotic free.

It's lower.

And if we could phase out the use of antibiotics and farm animals through things like heritage breed birds, grass fed cattle, that sort of thing, and some sort of enforcement mechanism, that would that would definitely be a huge step in the right direction, both for antibiotic resistance and for pandemic risk.

a lot of the environmental harms would be less significant as well.

Um, and the thing to say about all of these, um, is that we're going in the wrong direction, um, across all of these issues.

Um, on antibiotic resistance the top two causes are our overuse of antibiotics in human beings, um, and just use of medically relevant antibiotics in humans at all.

Those are the top two causes.

Um, more than 70% of medically relevant, in other words human antibiotics, more than 70% of them are fed to farm animals.

Right.

So why are urologists so desperate to abandon it now? Is it just the, you know, the whole global threat of antimicrobial resistance? Like, is that finally outweighing individual patient relief?

Well, antimicrobial resistance or AMR is definitely the massive macro level driver here.

I mean, we are inadvertently breeding these multidrug resistant superbugs, especially with plasmid mediated resistance right there in the urogenital tract.

But honestly, the pivot away from antibiotics is equally driven by individual patient outcomes.

Eye infections are common in pets and horses and are routinely treated with topical antibiotics.

However, a recent study shows a troubling trend in antimicrobial resistance.

The study zeroes in on bacterial keratitis, an infection of the cornea that warrants immediate attention.

If left untreated, it can rob an animal of its sight within days, sometimes even hours.

I can jump in here first.

Definitely something that is on my mind is antimicrobial resistance, and I think that this is one of the biggest health threats going on that really isn't getting the attention that it deserves, and it undercut- you know, undercuts and relates to really everything that we're talking about in this book and certainly so many other diseases and infectious diseases.

And this is all tied to financialization again, right? And how we are organizing, you know, livestock [laughs], you know, how we're raising livestock, um, how we are, again, using the environment, pumping antibiotics, you know, into other places, spilling over into water and things like that.

So I think the potentials for antibiotic resistance or more broadly antimicrobial resistance, um, is really scary when you think about it.

And again, when you kinda couple that with these same financial processes that have led to a lack of funding and research in antibiotics and treatments for infectious diseases, makes, makes me a bit nervous, that's for sure.

[clears throat]

And I think, you know, in the field of sociology or social sciences more broadly, I might spec- speculate that one of the reasons that this has maybe been under-researched is we don't have data on it in the same way that we do disease outcomes, for example, or other types of health service, you know, measures.

Um, it's hard to measure this, right? Except for in these really few extreme cases.

And in most cases, what tends to happen is, is the clinician will just give these broad spectrum antibiotics, which can obviously have detrimental effects on, on lots of health associated microorganisms that you find throughout the body, and therefore, um, can be quite, uh, quite dangerous for the patient.

Um, and it can increase their risk of, of developing antimicrobial resistance.

Obviously, AMR genes that are constantly passed amongst different microorganisms within biofilms is, it's an increasing issue, um, you know, globally, not only just in the UK.

And, you know, it's always important for us as microbiologists that work with sort of novel therapies, the idea is really can you find alternatives to antibiotics? Is there a way that you can treat patients with various infections without the need to basically fire lots and lots of antibiotics against a particular microorganism or collection of microorganisms in a biofilm?

Amazing.