>>23093 Off-topic.. I'm not a violent person at all, but is it just me or does Tim Martin have an enormously punchable face?
Sometimes I'm convinced he's just a Harry Enfield sketch that's gone horribly horribly wrong and he's been waiting for years for someone to get the joke and laugh so he can finally take the wig off.
>>23106 They'll be the death of us yet, anyway. Their poor have a truly unfortunate habit of consuming antibiotic pills individually (as in, one at a time, not a full treatment), failing to kill whatever bacteriological infection they were suffering from, and then shitting where they walk, eventually introducing the now-resistant bacterial strain into the food chain. This is a slow but methodical way to create antibiotic immunity in harmful bacteria, and has been instrumental in wiping out the usefulness of many of the most effective antibiotics.
We're pretty much the only country in the world that effectively limits anti-biotic prescriptions. And even then, we undo a lot of that hard work by putting anti-biotics in animal feed and so on.
Like I said a while ago, never mind covid, it's going to be antibiotic resistance that will get us to the end. Look at the graph of global population over the 20th century, and you'll notice we'd hit the peak up until antibiotics were made widely available.
>>23109 >We're pretty much the only country in the world that effectively limits anti-biotic prescriptions.
Got anything to back that up? I get that we regulate the stronger stuff pretty effectively but there's still big problems with over-prescribing penicillin.
Note an actual experience of mine a few years back:
GP: "Yes that cyst on your neck is infected, I'll give you some antibiotics."
Me: "Can you cut it out please so it doesn't keep getting infected again in future?"
GP: "No, it's just cosmetic."
Also the many many cases of tonsillitis which could be caused by a viral infection such as glandular fever, but the doctors will rather just prescribe antibiotics first instead of screening.
I don't have any figures, but: Something like 99% of organisms are resistant to penicillin, amoxicillin and derivatives already, so it really don't matter. You can prescribe that while having a swab sent off to the lab to rule out other sources of infection.
When a doctor sends a swab from an infected would or tonsilitis or whatever for testing, it's usually not really to see if/how it's infected. They usually already know that because the vast majority of infections your average person gets are mundade and entirely commonplace. What they're really sending it off for is to see which antibiotics the infection is sensitive and resistant to.
There's then first, second and third line antibiotics which the consultant microbiologist selectively authorises. When the doctor gets the report back from the lab it only includes the first line, the others are censored so some silly bugger doesn't go giving out gentamicin for a chest infection without specific authorisation.