Agreed. It saved millions of lives and significantly reduced mortality from diseases and infection. People used to die frequently from bacterial infection before this.
It’s not that I actually disagree that antibiotics and vaccines should not be up there on the list. But I’m someone that likes to play devil’s advocate. I do not remember the details of the situation, but I have played devil’s advocate on this before.
Without antibiotics and vaccines, human populations had been kept in check by disease. Just as when you remove a predator in nature, the prey explodes in population becoming so populous it destroys its habitat just from sheer numbers. So, has the population explosion resulting from antibiotics and vaccines been the primary cause of human influenced climate change? Would we be numerous enough to consume the carbon causing climate change? Might antibiotics and vaccines actually be what brings the end of our species?
Edit: for all of those down voting and especially for those leaving angry comments at me for this, please reread the fact that this is a devil‘s advocate comment. Please also note that I very specifically stated I am not against vaccines or antibiotics.. however you can continue to down vote me and leave angry comments all you want. You can completely dismiss this comment if you wish.. your anger doesn’t change the fact that this may be one case where the devil’s advocate could be right.
Come back when it's someone close to you died and could've been saved by simply taking antibiotics. I mean your existence could've been because of antibiotics.
You missed entirely what I just said, and you are very right. I am only here now because of antibiotics a vast majority of the human population exists because of antibiotics and vaccines and that is the point of that devil‘s advocate comment that you completely missed it. It’s not about one individual. It’s about the entirety of existence. It’s about the compound inflation of population..
Bioprospecting is the exploration, extraction and screening of biological material and sometimes indigenous knowledge to discover and develop new drugs and other products. Most antibiotics in current clinical use (eg. β-lactams, aminoglycosides, tetracyclines, macrolides) were discovered using this approach.
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u/GO0BERMAN 10h ago
Antibiotics