Warnings of catastrophic threats are often preludes to something our minders have in store for us.

Maybe PhRMA has a new superbug antibiotic they’re about to roll out and they need a ready market?

At 62, I now realized I lived in the Golden Age of Western human history. Living in a country untouched by the devastation of war, unrestricted worldwide travel, easy money, civil liberties largely respected, relatively effective health care at a somewhat reasonable price, almost free education (Calif colleges before RR)… most of all, I remember what it was like to live without fear.

Now? Sheesh, what can I say? If our own gov’t doesn’t toss you in a FEMA camp, drone-bomb ya, bug all your communications, hassle you until you drop dead, send the school loan ‘debt’-collectors after ya… then the mutated diseases will swoop around the world zapping people.

You missed Viet Nam then?

The future ain’t what it used to be.

Hedrick Smith documented the fall pretty well I thought in his Who Stole the American Dream?

I can only be *grateful* that I’m close to your age. Agree with what you said.

BigPharma has been a Pusher for over-use of prescription drugs, esp over the past three decades. I will take antibiotics but only as sparingly as possible. Sadly too many dr over-prescribe antibiotics for a ton of conditions that will not benefit from ingesting antibiotics.

And here is a very predictable result. Albeit: what eCAHN said @1.

That’s a good book, but I can sum up the answer briefly: the 1%.

Thank all the forces of the universe, we got Bushmasters! Solves everything.

s/

No. Antibiotics are cures, and not very profitable.

Pharma are only interested in treating symptoms among the wealthy elderly. Much better cash flow.

Ah VietNam… nah, I was drafted and THEN decided to resist. Not the best way to do it but they let me out in a year after induction. Never made it to the Colonial Wars.

Not only missed VN, Korea but the other 50+ military interventions the USG did after WWII. I haven’t found the list of the USG atrocities before WWII yet, but some one must have written it up.

But hey, it was Golden Age for peeps living in U.S. if you don’t count the misery the U.S. caused elsewhere.

MRSA killed my father, he contracted it in a nursing facility. He had long term MS and the outcome could not have been different before too long. Still, if one is seriously ill, hospitals and their downstream cousins can be very dangerous places to be.

I’m suggesting PhRMA might have a new super duper antibiotic in the wings wh, under patent, will cost (picking a # out of the air) $20,000/dose, or whatever the super duper profit PhRMA can extract, after they collude with med ins corps to see what price the two of them can come up with.

And many have speculated that this is one reason progress towards a cancer cure is so slow.

Sorry to hear about your father. It will become a very common story or should I say more common if new antibiotics are not developed.

I agree that the Powell memo is a good place to start with understanding Neoliberalism in America but I would recommend David Harvey’s work to understand it as a global movement.

BTW, I’ve been reading the scare story about superbugs for a couple of decades.

So, I’m at a fundraiser last year at the home of a modestly important person, speaking with an attractive woman, a 50-ish biochem professor at a very good local college. She says she had to go back to teaching after a career on the innovation end of the pharma industry. Her research field was antibiotics. So, how are we doing in that field currently I ask, given how much developed resistance has occurred. Not well, she says. There’s pretty much nothing in the pipeline. How come, I ask, and she says the companies don’t make enough money off antibiotics. So they don’t devote a lot of resources to looking for them.

I ask around among friends at various points in the pipeline – from early funding to FDA approval – and find that most agree it’s so: there isn’t much in the pipeline and the big money in pharma isn’t looking too hard. A variety of opinions as to lack of motivation, but my PhD biochemist’s explanation sounds as good as any other I’ve heard. For all of the money the public spends on research, it seems to me there ought to some way to get pharma – big and small – to keep this strategic human capability in good shape.

You’d be safer having operations on your kitchen table.

Time to remove surgery and after-surgery care away from hospitals.

As my father used to say “Doctors kill their mistakes”.

80% of antibiotics are used in industrial farming to fatten up pigs and chickens. This is the real issue. See this.

2% of the budget is spent on science and medicine. 20% for defense. I wonder how much actually is spent on research for drugs.

Yet another reason not to eat much meat.

Antibiotics should cost more. This would provide more incentive to research and prevent overuse.

Well if people die faster due to “superbugs” that are resistant to current antibiotics – which is happening??? So what? It’s just more Death Panels for Granny, as well as you and me.

The 1% have their own safer very private med facilities to go to for treatments and/or they can be treated in their homes. What does the 1% care if more serfs die bc of superbugs resistant to current antibiotics?

I think it’s called a feature, not a glitch. Not snark.

Great idea. Let’s price all the poor people who show up in emergency rooms out of antibiotics, or price them into taking half a dose of antibiotics, thereby further propagating MRSA. That would be a brilliant epidemiological strategy.

OK. Who’s going to set the price higher and how? Where do the increased profits go? The pharma companies are already making huge profits AND getting a lot of R&D paid for or at least subsidized by the taxpayers.

Why if only teh poorz wouldn’t be so frickin’ LAZY ‘n moochers ‘n all, they’d get offa their LAZEEE butts, pull themselves up by their bootstraps and go do their own R&D to invent & develop their own personal antibiotics.

Isn’t that what all these freedumb loving Ayn Randians do in Gult’s Gultch????

One commercial speaks volumes about Big Pharma: Abilify, an anti-depressant to be taken by patients who are on anti-depressants that aren’t delivering results.

And don’t even get me started on ads for Viagra, Cialis, and Levitra.

In reality, capitalism is intended as a closed system and American medicine is just another theme and variation of the monetization and extraction of “wealth.” The target of the wealth transfer in corporatized medicine is the individual’s naturally occurring health state. So, in short, this crisis described is a manufactured crisis that started in the late 1980s/early 1990s when the American surgeon’s pre-op scrub, Triclosan (antibiotic), began being dumped into dish washing detergents and distributed without comment OTC (Over The Counter) via corporate stores as Safeway. I wouldn’t touch the stuff as I had the education to know what it was and why to avoid it but this was not the case for a whole host of people washing, bathing and ingesting (trace quantities of) it.

There are solutions and a way off the Conveyor-Belt-of-Death but capitalism, corporations and the American legal system as it is today will never offer them by design and have even gone out of their way to pre-empt individuals’ choices (examples abound including the Terri Schiavo case). Instead, you have to look beyond these systems. Advanced systems of aboriginal medicine contain solutions for many of these 1%er-created and driven issues including MRSA. In general, the basic components for recovery are the individual’s mental attitude, health state and willingness to do the mental and life changes required to get better unless the person really is imminently terminal.

So, the first step is clean water, air and food (organic). You want to receive only from sources you can verify are worthy of your trust but ask questions and read all labels of any purchases. Assuming anything these days simply risks your health and that of those to which you are connected.

OT– IMO folks should be watching this:

@ENENews
Watch: Live stream of #Fukushima Symposium in NYC http://enenews.com/watch-live-stream-fukushima-event-nyc … Medical and Ecological Consequences
8:23 AM – Mar 11, 2013 · Details

Call me when an uber weaLTHY .1%ER DIES OF MRSA OR SOME OTHER SUPERBUG. dON’T BELIEVE ANYTHING THAT IS ALLOWED TO BE A STORY ON THE msm. dON’T TRUST AND TRY TO VERIFY.

I think that’s a very accurate summary of the economic elite’s worldview, but that’s not how it will work out in real life. Effective public health strategies also benefit the elite, while the primitive, privatized world they are making will harm them, in terms of objective measures of well-being.

However, good public health decreases the difference in well-being between the plutocrats and everyone else: good policy has greater marginal benefits for the masses than their masters. This is also true of public education, the rule of law, labor rights, and basically all the indicators of civilization., all the way down to abolition of slavery.

The fact that the rentiers consistently opt for maximizing the gap between themselves and the rest, rather than their own actual welfare, reveals the truly primitive forces that are increasingly determining how we live, barely concealed by technocratic blather about “market efficiencies” and whatnot.

Viruses also develop reistance to vaccines.
With anti-biotics and vaccines, there should be more caution about mass innoculations and overuse of antibiotics for viruses and other bugs that most people already have the immune systems to fight naturrally. The worry becomes that in, a race to save a few, a resulting mutation of bacteria or a virus could evolve that would be more devasting.
But we’ll see more resistant strains in the future. We just have to hope our bodies can naturally adapt faster than the mutations.

Thank you. You beat me to it. This really should’ve been in the article.

Bullshit:

Advanced systems of aboriginal medicine contain solutions for many of these 1%er-created and driven issues including MRSA.

I’ve seen a lot of “Aboriginal Medicine”. I’d take my chances in a western hospital, even if it is called Baragwanath (Inside joke).

True, it is called Public Health (but it is not a source of profit):

So, the first step is clean water, air and food (organic).

If so then Gooole antibiotics research at NIH. We (the public) pay for the research and the drug companies run the clinical trials.

American Wars on Wikipedia has a pretty good list.

I can remember watching commercial beekeepers sprinkle Terramycin into their hives, just in case.

> Warnings of catastrophic threats are often preludes to
> something our minders have in store for us.

Often, and often not. Which is this, if you don’t mind me asking?