The race against time: Humans vs drug resistant bacteria

in life •  7 years ago 

Bacteria evolves at a fast rate and develops drug resistance

We know there are drug resistant bacteria. Antibiotics were used traditionally to reduce a risk caused by bacteria infection. The infection is called sepsis and it is this reason which causes us to be required to wash our hands. When we shower we remove bacteria from our skin (but never can remove all of it). Sepsis costs a lot to treat and also is very deadly.

Will humanity out evolve and out compete the bacteria which can kill us all?

Bacteria in order to remain under our control has to be and remain susceptible to drugs. This means there is a race for survival where humans must continue to keep inventing more effective drugs in order to evolve the effectiveness of these drugs faster than the bacteria can evolve to adapt an immunity to the drugs.

Humanity is all in this together

This is an example of a concern or problem which should unite all of humanity. It is a problem which can be solved by working collaborative to create new treatments for bacterial infection whilst limiting the use of "secret weapon" treatments so that the bacteria never has the opportunity to mutate a drug resistance to all known treatments. This in essence is a war between humanity and bacteria.

If we do not work together to solve this problem we will eventually be wiped out or thinned out by a pandemic. This pandemic has happened before with the Spanish flu and the Black Plague. All of our community and blockchain technology itself can reward the humans who decide to allocate computation resources (whether their own brain or their CPUs) toward the task of building a more resilient species and toward developing drug resistant antibiotics.

Collaborative knowledge generating and development of new treatments whether it be gene editing, or new drugs, all can contribute toward reducing the risk of global pandemics. Perhaps we can think of what we could build as a collective external immune system?

In Tau related news, Ohad has just released a draft for an optimized forward reasoner

The first part of my post was an example of what we could hopefully use something like Tauchain to do. The current status of development of Tauchain is that Ohad just released a draft of an optimized forward reasoner. I'm not sure if it's in a state where it's useful just yet but it shows development is headed in the right direction. Do you think Tauchain is too ambitious of a project? Do you think development is going too slow? Do you think Agoras should be on an exchange already? Express your opinions.

References

  1. http://www.who.int/medicines/publications/global-priority-list-antibiotic-resistant-bacteria/en/
  2. https://github.com/IDNI/tau/commit/4625b33363295524c234fd05ea75210490e4ed0a
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Hello @dana-edwards! I am sorry for disturbing you but I wanted to ask you something because all my posts were downvoted by @steemcleaners. You are an experienced author and you know better than me. I translated my last health scientific posts from Russian language so it means I did not copy anything because it is a different language. I do not use any online translators, I translated the article myself using my own words. But they show me a link to the Russian source. It is a scientific article so I can not add much new information to it, I am not a scientist. So is it called a plagiarism here? I thought it was called a rewriting and it was acceptable. Or maybe I had to put a link to the Russian source myself? I just don`t know what to do, for 2 years I have never faced such problems. They even did not warn me at first but just flagged everything with money I paid to the bots. When i connected with them in Discord, they are writing "haha" and mocking me.

Why did they downvote all of your posts ever? Why did they not only download just the questionable post? Why didn't they warn you?

I have no control over the decisions of Steamcleaners but to downvote all your posts or any of your posts without a warning is unprofessional. Here is what I do know and what I always suggest for you and anyone; if you do post based on another article always cite the original source article and then you cannot be accused of plagiarism.

What I think would be fair (and they likely will not abide by this) is that they request you to cite your sources going forward and agree not to downvote your future posts as long as you do this. In addition if you willingly cite your sources for the posts they did downvote they should remove the downvotes.

Rewriting you can do but you should tag it as rewritten and link to the post in Russian. In my opinion at least for me and most people this resolves it. If they decide it doesn't and will not communicate then perhaps it's something more personal or political.

Something similar happened to me. I posted too frequently for a couple of months and some people complained that it was impossible for someone to post so often. They couldn't post so often so they decided no one else can. I didn't get downvoted but there were all sorts of complaints as if I broke the unwritten rule. It was that experience which let me know that there are unwritten rules on Steem and that politics play a heavy role.

Thank you for your answer @dana-edwards. I am not telling I acted right. I thought that translation of the text from another language meant rewriting because I used different words, some synonyms. It is a different language so it can`t be totally the same, even the translation from one language to another is a work. Now I understand I was wrong and that is what I wanted to find out. They downvoted only one of my posts and asked to connect with them on Discord. I did it but was too silly to ask them if the translation meant plagiarism too, if I had to put the link to the source. I just wanted to avoid problems in future and wanted to find out the rules for myself. But it was really silly to connect with them and to ask about the rules because I attracted their attention. After it they began to check up my texts much better and flagged all of them though I told I was sorry, asked them to remove at least some of their flags. They began to laugh at me, to write "ha-ha", "move on, man." I think it is not professional to write such abusive things to a woman, to a mother of a little child. Nobody warned me at first, explained their rules. Everything seemed funny for them because they have been flagging my posts for two days. Today in the morning they flagged the rest of them. The same they did with Karinas posts and she paid to bots for all of them, just without any warning so we lost a lot of money. I am thinking to leave Steemit because all people will think I am a scammer now.

I would suggest you wait this out. SMTs will be released and then you'll be able to find your niche. Right now Steem is very politicized around the reward pool. Even the founders of Steem are in some conflicts; @dan and @ned. I think it's unavoidable for now.

I am just in despair now. Thank you for attention and your advice @dana-edwards.

I found it interesting in the USA as everyone I know goes to the doctor for antibiotics for a simple sniffle. That way they feel they will have an "emergency ration" for when a cold hits (go figure that one as a cold starts as a virus) Regardless, my experience is that doctors/hospitals in the USA are big business and readily hand out antibiotics. This is very foreign to me being a Canadian as we feel you have to be on death's door before you will get a prescription for antibiotics. The doctors here will tell you that they are monitored for the amount of antibiotics they prescribe simply in the hopes of not over using to the point of resistance. Regarding the Tauchain, I believe in the power of the human brain to reason. By letting a computer do that for you, well, the reasoning will be only as good as the algorthym is.

All is done by our medical scientists mostly they have introduce the virus and germs and they also suggest the treatment

The earlier the world come together to create a bacterial resistance antibiotics the better for us all, because I am seeing a global health challenge between human and bacteria illness. Because bacterial virus are mutating and developing a more stronger and resistant bacterial . The world health organisation and the united Nations should increase their research in improving and producing a more advanced antibacterial drugs to combat these future health pandemic from happening .

I wish I was fluent in computer science enough to look at that github post and tear up like “omg 🤭....it’s beautiful”

The more we create more sophisticated drugs to tackle this bacteria the more complex they become it's more like they are evolving ...you sure said it all the best way to tackle this is to work together More like a pool of resources and knowledge to help make the world a better place...
Awesome post

  ·  7 years ago (edited)

Bacteria reproduces at a very fast rate.
I think more energy can be channelled into more research on the use of bacteriophage therapy, the virus that has the ability to kill a bacteria. Their specificity in action is one of their major advantages and there is little or no chances of these bacteria developing resistance to them. I wrote an article to this effect.

I would consider the continuous development of artificial intelligence another ally in creating new drugs to keep up with the evolution of bacteria and not only.
On one hand such technology may seem dangerous when involved in military activities, but in medical research could be more important than imagined.

bacteria resistance to antibiotics is one of world's disturbing health issues but i am of the opinion that more research needs to be carryout to understand more the genetic behavioural pattern of bacteria.thanks

Time for upgrading the immune system...