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drethelin comments on Crazy Ideas Thread - Less Wrong Discussion
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This would at best be a temporary solution, since this was pretty much the status quo before MRSA was as big a deal as it is now. The continued presence of antibiotics will exert a selection pressure in favor of MRSA.
So.... we keep the factories running. Seems like a small price to pay for the continued effectiveness of antibiotics.
If your plan is to spray MRSA into the air forever I'm pretty sure that will lead to far more deaths from untreated or treated too late infections than you would be saving by making some subset of existing infections treatable.
Maybe air-spraying is the wrong distribution method - possibly it would be better to just use trucks or whatever.
There is an adjustable parameter which is how many bacteria we add to the environment per unit time. That parameter controls how quickly the resistant bacteria are replaced by non-resistant bacteria. But regardless of the value, the shape of the function of resistant bacteria population vs time should be exponential decline. So if you are worried about extra infections, you can select a small value for the replacement parameter.
Say you follow a schedule where on the first of every month, you release a bunch of bacteria, increasing the total population in an area by 1%. Then over the course of the month, the population falls back down to its initial value. If you do this for many months, you will eventually cause a large impact to the population of resistant bacteria, while never increasing the aggregate number of bacteria in the environment by more than 1%.
Yeah, consider it a maintenance problem.