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hsrob on 09 March 2013
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Mnementh said:
hsrob said:
Mnementh said:
Carl2291 said:
Medicine will be greatly improved, things like AIDS and Cancer will be a "thing of the past", before a new disease pops up.

Well, currently we have another future. We finally successfully created bacteria resistant against all antibiotica. That comes from overusing antibiotica for non-fatal diseases and using it simply too much. That probably means in the future it might be a risk to go to the hospital.

While this is a possible risk for the future, it is also possible, or even likely if given enough time, that any such event could be offset by improvements in rational drug design.

While antiobiotic resistant bugs are a practical risk these days, anything that's biological has numerous avenues for potential attack.  In future it is very likely that we will get much better at investigating and categorising such targets in viruses and bacteria and quickly producing drugs to target them.

I don't talk about the future here, we already have antibiotics-resistat bacteria. That was a scenario that was warned about decades ago, but the antibiotics misuse was continued. About the resistant bacteria I read multiple time on german media, a quick search produces this english source:

http://gothamist.com/2013/03/06/nightmare_bacteria_resistant_to_ant.php

http://www.abc2news.com/dpp/news/health/deadly-new-superbug-resistant-to-antibiotics

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/cdc-warns-of-rise-in-nightmare-bacteria/2013/03/05/5596b952-85cb-11e2-999e-5f8e0410cb9d_story.html

The articles are all very alarmist (as to expect from mainstream-media), but the point is the bacteria that developed resistance against all used antibiotics that was feared in the last years is now reality. If this concrete bacteria will be a bigger problem is questionable, but other bacteria that already are multiresistant might gain the resistance to the last resort antibiotics in the future too. This is a serious problem and one we cannot deal so easily with. We could have avoided it, if we changed our usage of antibiotics 10-20 years ago.

You miss understood me.  I'm well aware of current struggles with drug resistant strains of bacteria as I actually work in a hospital.  CRE mentioned in the articles, although highly resistant to many antibiotics, is still not actually resistant to all antibiotics.

Nonetheless I took your meaning to be that we could, in the future, have scenarios like we already have but worse  i.e. a strain or strains of bacteria that completely resistant to all antiobiotics. I was simply pointing out that although the bugs can change, so will our ability to fight them.