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Comment by ciconia | Hacker News Reader

This isn't just about antibiotics, it's also about monoculture. Both of those combined lead to a never ending arms race.

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> In the study, E coli carrying a resistance gene, called MCR-1, were exposed to AMPs known to play important roles in innate immunity in chickens, pigs, and humans.

If the same kinds of AMPs appear across mammals and birds, breaking the monoculture (by e.g. raising animals of different breeds and species etc) but still using this class of antibiotics would still seem likely to cause the immune resistance problem. I'm not advocating for the monoculture-based practices, but I don't see how it's related to this specific mechanism.

I think the connection to monoculture is that specific pathogens could decimate homogenous populations (see Irish potato famine), making widespread antibiotic use necessary in a much more preventative way

Monocultures have a history of disaster. The Great Irish Famine happened, in part, because the economic system at the time forced the working class to depend on a potato monoculture for sustenance.

We see a similar result happening where our economic system forces us to depend on monocultures for food production.

> a never ending arms race

  Did you mean, "the great filter?"

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