Health chief warns: age of safe medicine is ending

[Newsjock]

Source: The Independent

The world is entering an era where injuries as common as a child's scratched knee could kill, where patients entering hospital gamble with their lives and where routine operations such as a hip replacement become too dangerous to carry out, the head of the World Health Organisation (WHO) has warned.

There is a global crisis in antibiotics caused by rapidly evolving resistance among microbes responsible for common infections that threaten to turn them into untreatable diseases, said Margaret Chan, director general of the WHO.

Addressing a meeting of infectious disease experts in Copenhagen, she said that every antibiotic ever developed was at risk of becoming useless.

"A post-antibiotic era means, in effect, an end to modern medicine as we know it. Things as common as strep throat or a child's scratched knee could once again kill."

Read more: http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/health-chief-warns-age-of-safe-medicine-is-ending-7574579.html

[applegrove]

1. I know somebody who went in for a hip replacement and came out with an infection which

has festered for 10 months. And the doctors no longer know what to do. Really scarry.

[alfredo]

2. The future looks less appealing.

It appears we are entering a world envisioned in "The Windup Girl."

[felix_numinous]

3. The paradigm of 'going to war against' everything has to shift

back into 'living in harmony and balance with' everything. This dominating culture of assuming that we must fight everything, sees everything as a threat. Look where the arms race has gotten us. We fight terror with more terror and create more terror. The war on drugs creates violence and more suffering than the drugs themselves. We fight life with life (anti-bios) and have created modern mini frankenstein monsters. Surprise!

The war mentality has come home to bite us in the ass. We will be forced to rethink our coexistence, with each other, with plants and animals, and with microorganisms, or we will perish.

[CrispyQ]

4. +1

"I’d like to share a revelation that I’ve had, during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you aren’t actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with its surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply, and multiply until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You are a plague, and we... are the cure."

~Agent Smith

[felix_numinous]

6. One of my favorite Matrix scenes!

"You're not actually mammals..."

Imagining complex machines coming to that conclusion is sadly, not too hard.

[magical thyme]

5. jplease. evolution is bunk.

and it's all a liberal plot. for the impaired.

Seriously, we've got to get the antibiotics out of animal feeds. People need to stop demanding them for viruses. And when they are prescribed, take the full dose for the full amount of time.