Writer and architect Jamie Blairford says people must understand what's at risk if antibiotics begin losing effect
NEO-CONSERVATIVES have a whole variety of ways of offing you, ranging from waging illegal wars and stirring up lethal terrorism as a result, to applying their beloved austerity in a cack-handed way, so what are we talking about here that could be any worse? We are talking about the failure to replace increasingly ineffective antibiotics.
What, you may ask, has this to do with neo-conservatism?
The recent flurry of coverage in the media on the subject has gone thus: the current range of antibiotics is quickly becoming ineffective, as bugs adapt to them and become resistant. If no new types of antibiotics are developed, untold numbers of people will die from conditions that can currently be treated successfully. The pharmaceutical industry is not seriously working on any replacements because it does not see a profit in it, so that’s it folks, end of story.
Panorama screened a programme on how to extend the life of the current crop of drugs, but just accepted, as a given, that if there is no profit for it in the private sector, new drugs will not happen. There is no other way, so brace yourselves!
If no new types of antibiotics are developed, untold numbers of people will die from conditions that can currently be treated successfully.
The whole neo-con faith, handed down to us by the great prophets Reagan and Thatcher, who revealed the power of the God and the free market after seeing off the heretics of communism, socialism and keynesianism, is now the only way forward in the new religion of politics.
Government, with its innate inefficiencies and interventions, is the ultimate evil and must be gradually rooted out in all its forms to release us into the glory of the ultra efficient, all-conquering free market.
If the free market cannot come up with a solution to developing new antibiotics, then it simply cannot be done, end of. Whole generations who have grown up entirely under the 'new religion' do not even question this, as they have known nothing else, but some of us who have seen other ways, view it differently.
Let us go back to the beginning of antibiotics to see how this whole spectacular lifesaver, and generator of a huge pharma industry, started. It began during the 1920s in the hospital laboratory of a messy Scotsman, Alexander Fleming.
He had taken part in World War I and had seen, at close range, the direct slaughter of the war as well as the dreadful secondary loss of life from infected wounds and injuries. He dedicated himself to finding ways of alleviating the suffering he had seen.
Panorama screened a programme on how to extend the life of the current crop of drugs, but just accepted, as a given, that if there is no profit for it in the private sector, new drugs will not happen.
When he discovered the solution, penicillin mould, in a pile of petri dishes awaiting washing, he had no thought of how he could commercially exploit this find for his own benefit. He did not even take out a patent on it.
Progress was then slow until the 1940s, with the country at war, for the next steps to be taken of scaling up production of the drug. This was carried out by an Oxford University team, working within a system of grants from government and the Rockefeller Foundation, the system within which much research was carried out at that time, and not by a big pharma company.
The Oxford team managed to find a way of extracting small quantities of the active ingredient in the mould and carried out very successful trials on mice. Eventually they used it on a person, Albert Alexander, a policeman who was dying of an infection contracted from a scratch acquired while pruning roses.
Yes folks, this is the reality of a world with no antibiotics that we are rushing back to again, where a child’s skinned knee or a minor gardening scratch can prove fatal. The new penicillin proved extremely effective on the policeman, but the team could not make sufficient quantities of it to complete the treatment. They even worked hard to recover the drug from the patient’s urine and recycle it, but could not save him. However, the great power of the drug was proven.
At Oxford, they managed to demonstrate that production could be scaled up, by cobbling together apparatus using even milk bottles and bed pans, but could not get funding to pursue it seriously with all the demands of government spending on war. Eventually, they took it to America and approached the big pharma companies there, but received a similar response to the one they'd already had: "There is no profit or valuable patents in it for us, so we are not interested." America, not being in the war at the time, saw no benefit.
It is always a struggle to get the balance right on what governments can lead on best and where the free market can be left to run free. One fact is clear: where a country faces a direct threat to its existence, such as invasion or war, it turns to government to run the war.
Then came Pearl Harbour. Suddenly, narrow commercial decisions were thrust aside and government moved in big time to organise the scaling up of this drug which might influence the outcome of the war by minimising losses of combatants from infections. As agricultural products were used in the fermentation of the active ingredient of penicillin, the project was run under the direction of the department of agriculture, which knocked heads together in pharma and successfully achieved mass production of the drug. This was the start of the whole revolution that we are seeing come to an end now.
Following World War II, governments which had led the war effort gradually detached themselves from many areas of the economy, more slowly in the UK than America. The resulting mixed economy was one of the most successful periods in history and a golden age for America.
It is always a struggle to get the balance right on what governments can lead on best and where the free market can be left to run free. One fact is clear: where a country faces a direct threat to its existence, such as invasion or war, it turns to government to run the war.
So far, we have not seen the execution of a war being put out to competitive tender between G4S and Serco. The private sector has a key role to play in these circumstances, but under government direction and control.
It is this neo-con 'faith' which has become so fixed in our culture that it is preventing a new generation of antibiotics being developed, as the private sector will not do it and government involvement is taboo.
It is this neo-con 'faith' which has become so fixed in our culture that it is preventing a new generation of antibiotics being developed, as the private sector will not do it and government involvement is taboo.
As a result, we risk returning to the pre-penicillin days when large numbers of children can die from a skinned knee or gardeners from an unlucky scratch. It's not just infections that will become untreatable: procedures such as chemotherapy for cancer, which rely on antibiotics to protect the patient while the immune system is disabled, will become life-threatening and possibly too dangerous to use.
The hubris of the neo-con elite allows them to think that they are above all this messy business of dying from infections, or that they will be able to buy their way out of it as they do with everything else. I have news for them, they and theirs will die with the rest of us.
Those with 'blind faith' are dangerous. We have seen so often in history how vast numbers of deaths can be tolerated in the defence of one 'faith' or another. Because of this blinkered, neo-con thinking, millions could die. That is how they will kill you, and yours, as well as their own.
We must urgently break through this blockage in planning for a new generation of antibiotics, on the full understanding that the market will simply not come up with the answer on its own, and governments must act and lead.
War on disease, like war on enemies, must bring together all the forces of government and industry and not just sit back and wait, with blind faith for the free market to deliver us.
The CommonSpace opinion section is an open platform for anyone who wants to voice their views and does not represent the editorial position of CommonSpace itself. If you'd like to have a piece published, email CommonSpace editor Angela Haggerty at angela@common.scot
Picture courtesy of Sparky
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