The “most” was doing key work in that sentence you quoted.
I totally buy that antiobiotic resistance is a large and growing problem. The part which seems like obvious bullshit is the claim that the cost outweighs the benefit, or is even remotely on the same order of magnitude, especially when we’re talking about an area like sub-Saharan Africa. Do any of those studies have a cost-benefit analysis?
(Also, side note: antibiotic resistance is totally in the news regularly. Here’s one from yesterday.)
Cost-benefit analysis is a very weak tool here, since costs are very hard to assess, long term, and uncertain, and in every individual case, it’s worth it because it’s a collective action problem and others are doing it wrong already.
There are estimates of the cost of antibiotic resistance, for example, almost $5b/year in the US alone. So from a collective action standpoint, if you assume that all agents are going to follow a policy, you at the very least only want to prescribe specific antibiotics when they are clinically useful—and even if you’re not running tests, etc. you need to know a really significant amount to know which antibiotics to use for which set of symptoms, and you should only prescribe them if there’s a pretty significant chance of full compliance. Hence the DOTS regime for TB—WHO guidelines require observing the patient taking each dose, not just prescribing it.
The “most” was doing key work in that sentence you quoted.
I totally buy that antiobiotic resistance is a large and growing problem. The part which seems like obvious bullshit is the claim that the cost outweighs the benefit, or is even remotely on the same order of magnitude, especially when we’re talking about an area like sub-Saharan Africa. Do any of those studies have a cost-benefit analysis?
(Also, side note: antibiotic resistance is totally in the news regularly. Here’s one from yesterday.)
Cost-benefit analysis is a very weak tool here, since costs are very hard to assess, long term, and uncertain, and in every individual case, it’s worth it because it’s a collective action problem and others are doing it wrong already.
There are estimates of the cost of antibiotic resistance, for example, almost $5b/year in the US alone. So from a collective action standpoint, if you assume that all agents are going to follow a policy, you at the very least only want to prescribe specific antibiotics when they are clinically useful—and even if you’re not running tests, etc. you need to know a really significant amount to know which antibiotics to use for which set of symptoms, and you should only prescribe them if there’s a pretty significant chance of full compliance. Hence the DOTS regime for TB—WHO guidelines require observing the patient taking each dose, not just prescribing it.