The Anonymous Widower

Snot Wars

There is no other title for a post about this article on the BBC, which is entitled Antibiotic resistance: ‘Snot wars’ study yields new class of drugs.

The research has been done at the University of Tübingen, which is one of Germany’s classical universities. Wikipedia says this.

Tübingen is one of five classical “university towns” in Germany; the other four being Marburg, Göttingen, Freiburg and Heidelberg.

It certainly sounds to me that ideas for this research, possibly started after a good academic dinner with lots of food and alcohol, if classical German universities are anything like our’s.

After all the idea has been literally up researchers noses for years.

These last two paragraphs of the BBC report describes how the antibiotic-like action was possibly created in the human body.

Prof Kim Lewis and Dr Philip Strandwitz, from the antimicrobial discovery centre at Northeastern University in the US, commented: “It may seem surprising that a member of the human microbiota – the community of bacteria that inhabits the body – produces an antibiotic.

“However, the microbiota is composed of more than a thousand species, many of which compete for space and nutrients, and the selective pressure to eliminate bacterial neighbours is high.”

So why hasn’t this new class of antibiotics been found before?

Could it be that medical research is too much about Loadsamoney and Big Pharma, rather than about ideas, seriously out-of-the-box thinking and dilligent research?

Brains are a lot easier to throw at a problem, than money. Except that good brains are much more difficult to find than good money.

July 28, 2016 - Posted by AnonW | Health | Drugs, Germany, Research