A reader has seen this coming:
I’m inclined to respond by saying “Gosh, really?” — not because of what you’ve written, Hue, but the general thought. Here’s what I wrote about the subject back in 2012, and I was hardly at the forefront of the observation then:http://sillenbuch.blogspot.com/2012/10/antibiotic-resistant-bacteria.html I’ve also got this bitter pill in my craw: “Assuming your illness could even be solved by antibiotics” — i.e. it’s bacterial. I speculate most illnesses are caused by other things. Of course, many illnesses require hospitalization where you become far more likely to be victim of antibiotic resistant strains! Hospitals are dangerous places; my neighbor [w]as in a car accident, and eventually died in the hospital from a nosocomial [hospital-acquired] bacterial infection. And lastly, “oh yes, it IS the cash” both in the sense that greed on the part of pharmaceutical manufacturers and industrial agriculturalists to use massive amounts of antibiotics, and the train wreck that is health insurance in the USA (my recent little kidney stone episode has topped $8,000 in bills I have to pay, even while having insurance). How’s that for a run-on sentence? Mankind is hell bent on destroying itself.
I went looking for illness causation numbers, but didn’t run across anything usable. It did lead to this statement from a 2012 Stanford Medical Newsletter issue on cancer:
At least 25 percent of malignancies are caused by viruses, bacteria and parasites. After smoking, infection is the leading cause of cancer. Although millions of Americans are infected with cancer-causing organisms at some time during their lives, most don’t develop cancer as a result. There are additional risk factors that work in tandem with infectious microbes to trigger the biological changes that lead to cancer.
Viruses are the main cancer-causing organisms, followed by bacteria and parasites.
