Losing the Battle vs. Infectious Disease?

[Beerina]

Yesterday I read an article where someone (possibly in the CDC) was claiming we were "losing the battle" vs. infectious diseases, meaning things like tuberculosis were out-evolving humanity's ability to produce new antibiotics. (Sorry, I don't have a link.)

But this got me thinking. Are we "losing" this battle? Julian Simon would have simply asked for the graphs of specific diseases, as well as humanity as a whole. If this were true, it should show upward trends in deaths.

Yes, at any given moment, the trend might be up due to a new mutation, but is it up overall in the long run?

 

[drkitten]

But this got me thinking. Are we "losing" this battle? Julian Simon would have simply asked for the graphs of specific diseases, as well as humanity as a whole.

He'd be an idiot if he did. Those are the wrong graphs to ask for.

Death rate is controlled by so many other factors, including the availability of basic health care, that it's easily possible -- indeed, likely -- that an increase in the virulence (or the decrease in the treatability) of some strains of a specific disease could be masked by improvements in general health care in the third world or something.

As a simple analogy -- it's fairly simple to establish that cars in the USA get better gas mileage today than they did in 1970. However, the per capita consumption of gasoline has actually gone up. People are buying larger cars (witness the emergence of the SUV) and driving farther (average commute time has something like tripled).

 

[Capsid]

There are 2 issues here. First, it would be viewed as losing the battle if large numbers of the population died through an upsurge in pathogenicity of a virus/bacterium. But secondly, the human race would survive overall since there are always some of us who can resist disease by genetic variants such as the CCR5-delta32 mutation.

 

[JJM]

This point is discussed at length in "The Antibiotic Paradox" (2nd ed., Perseus Publishing, 2002) by Stuart B. Levy. The subtitle is "How the misuse of antibiotics detroys their curative powers." Also, in the PBS video "Evolution" there is an hour-long segment on the problem, perhaps you can borrow a copy from a library. I assume that the companion volume by Carl Zimmer also has a chapter on the subject.