Supercharged Tuberculosis, Made in India | Hacker News Reader

Supercharged Tuberculosis, Made in India

scientificamerican.com

45 pointskungfudoi10 comments

While it looks grim, I think wheels are in motion. This article by World Bank - http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2013/05/09/india-ba... puts things more in perspective.

Bottom line:

1. Government has increased spending on Tuberculosis diagnosis and treatment.

2. Organizations like Gates foundation (http://www.gatesfoundation.org/What-We-Do/Global-Health/Tube...) are doing good job in getting things in motion.

3. NGO's like Operation Asha(http://www.opasha.org/) are doing tremendous job ensuring patients take their medication properly.

A big part of the problem seems to be diagnosis and proper treatment before the disease becomes drug resistant. This quote from linked article:

>All too often, patients are misdiagnosed and wrongly treated by private providers who then dump them, broke and drug-resistant, onto the public health system.

Really puts the singularity hype into perspective. For years I've been hearing from them about radical medical advances just around the corner, and here we see that on this front, rather than making exponential progress, or even just progress period, medical "science" is actually losing rather than gaining ground.

Medical science doesn't have a Moore's law. In fact, most things don't.

Anyway, we're losing ground because humans are applying medicine incorrectly. We take antibiotics for viral infections and, like the article states, we use antibiotics but don't cure the disease so the disease builds a resistance.

Short answer is that we did it to ourselves. I'm sure we'll spend billions of dollars in R&D and India will just ignore the patents.

Whom does the collective "we" refer to in "we'll spend billions of dollars in R&D" ?

I don't think your view quite reflects reality.

- We have made and will continue to make massive medical advances. Look at things like cancer survival rates, for example. - Drug-resistant TB is actually treatable, and the reason for its existence in the first place is poor treatment practices that encourage the development of resistance. If this is a failure of anything, it's healthcare protocol rather than science.

I looked at the cancer survival rates. Over 30 years this looks like slow progress to me:

http://healthhubs.net/images/cancer-survival-trends.gif

Im sure we can assign it to the survivors of a pandemic, to dig two massgraves - to be blamed and not to be blamed.

Guess who gets the flowers.

What i never actually got- why do we have to wait for this to happen in the wild ? What prevents us from cultivating connected tissuesamples, and breed the superbugs of the next generation in the lab, so that countermeasures are available when it happens?

I know that mutations (virus) and recombinations (exchange of dna between bacteria) are unpreditable - but most of them would remain local - only those infectious enough to be transfered are of interest, in the wild as in the lab.

Random mutations that give resistance may evolve differently even under the same evolutionary pressure.

You'd effectively get two independent strains which might or might not be sensible to the se drugs

Part of the problem is how easily antibiotics are available over the counter in India. No prescription required.

A large number of people self-prescribe or take the advice of non-medical people when looking for a cure.

I've seen folk take some pretty serious stuff (Tetracycline, Streptomycin etc.) on advice from the sales-staff at their local pharmacy.

The government has done little or nothing to stop this behaviour.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com