So assuming a world where antibiotics never existed which will lead to a higher mortality rate? I would have to believe that on balance bacteria are more dangerous because we don’t have many effective treatments for viruses yet we don’t have people dying in large numbers from them. Sure you have your Ebola’s but deaths from that are far and few between whereas I get strep throat quite often and in the old days it was a potentially deadly disease.
Bacteria is correct.
Just go back to the not really so long ago not yet antibiotics available world. Now it must be noted that we also have vastly improved public sanitation, food safety, immunizations, and more, but back in 1900 bacterial diseases were the big killers.
Even in influenza epidemics, bacterial pneumonia as the complication was the biggest killer.
Is it true to say that bacteria is the biggest threat to one single human but that a virus is a bigger threat to humanity?
Antibiotic-resistant bacteria is probably a greater threat than any virus.
Yersinia pestis (Black Plague) was a pretty big threat with 50 million dead, 30 to 60% of Europe’s population, in the 14th century.
Before antibiotics people died of things we would barely consider an inconvenience today. Like an blister from an ill-fitting shoe that gets infected. Before antibiotics almost any scratch that broke the skin had the potential to cause a life threatening infection. And don’t even get me started about cholera…
20 years ago, I lived in an area that had people with multi-drug resistant tuberculosis, and that scared me more than AIDS did. It still does, in part because MDRTB is transmissible through casual contact and AIDS isn’t; neither are most other viral illnesses, especially the really terrible ones.
Hmm, I remember getting BCG as a kid. I didn’t realize that we don’t have any satisfactory vaccine for adults.
Where were you living at the time, and how old are you? The only time I’ve ever seen that used is as a treatment for - get this - bladder cancer. It’s dissolved and instilled into the bladder and apparently stimulates some kind of immune response.
Before we did clinicals, we all had to get TB tests, except for two classmates who had, years before, emigrated from countries where TB was endemic (Uganda and Hong Kong) and because they had to have BCG before entering the country, the skin test would always turn up positive for them so they had to get chest x-rays.
A superbug despite the name is not anymore or any less dangerous than its anti-biotic vulnerable brethren.
MRSA is a common bacteria.
UK, I was born in the 1960s. BCG was routine at school then, I think it was that one that would often leave a small circular scar on the upper arm.
ETA: From googling, it looks like it was dropped only in 2005 for UK schoolchildren.
Huh? No more difficult for your immune system to deal with, is that what you mean?
But surely more dangerous, since a severe infection is much more difficult to treat.
When I was nursing in the 70s we couldn’t be rostered on the wards with TB patients until we had a positive Mantoux test. From memory I think I had 2 BCGs before I tested positive.
The small circular scar was typically from the smallpox vaccine, which has been mostly discontinued since smallpox is extinct in the wild.
There was an interesting article in Mother jones recently about bacteriophages - a type of virus that destroys bacteria - and their potential for stepping up against drug-resistant bacteria strains. Apparently, bacteriophages are in regular use in former-Soviet countries, where they’ve been studied for years.
The advantage of phages is that there’s a bazillion of them, each tuned to destroy a precisely specific species of bacteria. The downside is that this makes them hard to test. We don’t have a complete map of what each type of phage does. The specificity also means that the market for each phage species is very narrow, reducing the profitability of researching them. Also, because there’s so many phages, pharmacies can’t just stock a few bottles of each type, like they might for the different brands of antibiotic.
Still, if general antibiotics start to fail, the motivation for overcoming those problems will increase.
The article is perhaps overly optimistic, but I thought it was interesting.
Link to article
Here is a more approachable video by Kurzgesagt about bacteriophages and their role in fighting bacterial infections.
A more correct answer to this question might be to touch on the immunology.
A virus is this simple construct with an exposed pattern on the outside. It’s possible for your immune system to come up with an antibody that will stick to the exposed pattern and disable it. Only a very small number of viruses can’t be fought off by the body and stay around causing chronic problems, and HIV, for example, needs about 10 years to kill you and the actual reason you die is that your body hits a replication limit on T-cells. That’s the reason - if you didn’t have that rep limit you’d be able to fight HIV forever, it would never be fatal. It’s a flaw in your own body.
A bacterium is an armored entire cell that can reproduce on it’s own. It can basically shield itself in fuck-off plating and be very hard for your immune cells to kill. This is why certain ones kill half the humans infected and are much harder for your immune system to stop. They also have error correction and so don’t have the problem virii like HIV do, where they genetically drift rapidly away from effective variants.
Oh, and the real reason for “superbugs” is the corrupt way drug research is funded has shunted the money that would be otherwise developing new antibiotics elsewhere. If new antibiotics were being released at a reasonably steady rate, antibiotic immune bacteria would be rare to nonexistent.
BCG also leaves a very distinctive scar that doesn’t look like the smallpox scar, and is not familiar to Americans because so few people have it.
I was very surprised, while looking at that website, that so many countries give it at birth.
Historically, the number I’ve heard is that something like one third of humanity has died of smallpox. That one virus dwarfs all other infectious diseases.
However, it should be pointed out that this can’t be generalized; this particular virus happens to be extremely deadly.
Smallpox was also very spreadable, about as contagious as the common cold, except it persisted longer on surfaces. So deadly AND infectious.