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I'm unsure what you point is. Our current antibiotics are already producing resistant strains. We can either develop something completely new, or lace existing antibiotics with silver. Unless you are in this field and have some insight to bestow on us, I don't know of any other approaches at the moment. Improving our current methods by bolstering them with silver could be what we need to gain a new advantage against resistant strains.

Is it possible that we will eventually produce strains resistant to even this? Yes. Is the answer to just give up drop all attempts at antibiotics? Probably not.



At least part of the answer is to use antibiotics less, and to do more to ensure that when they are used, the full course is used.


This prevents production of more resistant strains, but we already have resistant strains out there. (Also, @pearjuice seemed to indirectly imply that the ability to improve our existing antibiotics was a bad thing)


>but we already have resistant strains out there.

But those resistant strains will be outcompeted by non-resistant strains without the presence of anti-biotics.

There is a fitness cost to most resistance mechanisms [1]

[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20208551


> At least part of the answer is to use antibiotics less, and to do more to ensure that when they are used, the full course is used.

If it gets bad enough, outpatient antibiotics use will be a thing of the past. Need antibiotics? You're staying in a facility where someone will monitor you and make sure you take the full course and don't make our resistance problems worse. It won't necessarily be a hospital and you won't necessarily be watched by doctors or nurses, but compliance will be mandatory and enforced.

I hope it doesn't get that bad.




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