On Monday night I went to the Germs, SuperBugs, & Antibiotic Resistance Table Talk with GRF Shiv and House Fellow Cynthia Hill.
Cynthia and Shiv started off by asking us a question: do you use antibacterial soap and do you think it is better than normal ones. Coming from an economics background, I honestly never paid attention to the kind of foam soap provided uniformly around campus, but I have heard the saying that artificially eliminating the bacteria on your skin may cause you physical system to be weaker to bacteria. I always find the question of whether we should use antibiotics very hard to answer. On the one side, my dad use to need to take a lot more medicine than normal people, since he took a lot of antibiotics as a child, as doctor and parents at the time weren’t aware of this strong side-effect of this medicine. So I generally avoiding taking any antibiotics during cold and fever, and instead take herbs and carry through. What Shiv and Cynthia talked about was alarming, there are about 25,000 people in America who die of taking antibiotics every year, and the death rate of children due to antibiotics shoot up in the past decade.
So what happened here? I would have imagined that as the medical technology grows and people are more aware that antibiotics is a double-blade sword, they would more cautious of taking it and doctor would be less likely to prescribe it unless the situations is really urgent. But this led me to think about the change of world through years and maybe people are weaker to certain disease as year goes. So Cynthia asked here: is it necessarily a bad thing that some people die of antibiotics? I thought that the underline alternative thinking is similar to Davinism. Maybe we can take antibiotics as a form of natural selection and people who survive the side-effect might possess more potent gene? I am not very sure, but personally I would rather to think about building solution to antibiotics harm.
Apart from that, one of the major things we discussed during the dinner was the SuperBug. Honestly I really thought Super Bug would be a physically ultra-large bug. Turned out I was totally wrong. Super bug is a kind of micro conceptual “bug” that is built us when someone take a overly large amount of antibiotics, and this wall of super bugs would make any medicine useless to your body. So in another way you can not get cured by medication anymore and have to survive yourself! (if i get the concept correctly) This is such a horrible concept that I feel this “super bug” is much more intimidating that any of the spiders I have seen in my dorm. From Shiv and Cynthia’s talking there seems not to be a solution to the super bug problem so far, and there are many cases of people who suffer from it.
Although the topic is very serious and heavy, I felt very happy that I chose to go to this event and get educated on antibiotics and the current trend on it. What I take away from this dinner is to be cautious of things you take into your body and always find some time to learn stuff outside of my subject area. Great experience!
While I did not attend this event, I found it interesting from your blog that discussion was focused mainly on the negative side-effects of taking antibiotics, as I have mainly been surrounded by the opposing argument.
My parents always emphasized preventive action in terms of diseases and were never excessive in taking me to the doctor for any simple illness, but I did encounter a similar argument against antibiotics in my introduction ecology class here at Cornell. My main takeaway was that antibiotics at an early age can have a larger impact on the microbial systems existing within the body, and thus changing how you personally deal with intrusions. Yet, one can argue that this is also influenced by the amount of probiotic food you ingest.
It’s interesting to see that there is an argument against antibiotic, since I have primarily been exposed to the opposite and how antibiotic treatments are the reason that life expectancy has increased over the years. I suppose the underlying question is now: what are the effects of medicine from a life expectancy vs. life quality perspective?
Though I also didn’t get the opportunity to attend the event, I am surprised at how much there is to learn about the usage of antibiotics. Contrary to some of the ideas that were expressed, I was always taught that usage of antibiotics as well as antibacterial soap can be counter intuitive in the sense that it can create super bugs like the one you mentioned towards the end of the article. However, I don’t think that really changed how my family or how people perceive those products in general. People generally just want to feel clean and don’t really care about its after effects.
What I didn’t know was that taking antibiotics could have an impact on the microbial systems living inside the body if we took them at an early age? I’ll definitely have to read up on this topic, but now I wish I had the chance to attend this talk 🙁