AS234: Scientifically Speaking

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:30 Thomas: Hello, and welcome to Atheistically Speaking. This is episode 234. Two, three, four! All right, cool milestone there. Celebrate. And I'm your host, Thomas Smith. Joining me back for a second time is Krakus Varsovian. I'm told that's a reference to something, right? But I don't know what that is.

0:00:48 Krakus: It is, well, you got the Google machine, right?, so, yeah,

0:00:50 Thomas: Okay, Okay. Someday I will figure that out. But then again, I could also just leave it a mystery, you know, because it sounds cool. So maybe it's better if I don't know. No. Welcome back. So you were telling me it was September that you were on the show and we talked about science and sort of the state of science funding in Canada, lots of stuff. It was really fascinating. And you've been also emailing about the Kevin Folta episodes, and you had some really cool stuff to add, some really interesting stuff to ad about antibiotics, about, well, a lot of different things. And I thought it would be really cool to have you back on. I've been meaning to since then, of course.

0:01:31 Thomas: But also, before we do all that, how about a Canadian science update? What do you say? Say.

0:01:38 Krakus: Absolutely, so, thanks a lot, Thomas, thanks for having me on, you're my favorite Gamecast member from now, by the way, no offense to the skating guys, actually, I've been listening to them since episode one, so that's, you know, I love those dudes, anyway, Yeah. So, for your American listeners, we had an election back in October, we, yeah,,

0:01:43 Thomas: I appreciate that.

0:01:56 Thomas: Oh, and you have a dreamy prime minister, right? I can't stop seeing this guy everywhere about how he's so great and just the best looking. The women love him.

0:02:07 Krakus: There's been a bit of a shock and awe, kind of, from the charisma department, with respect to that, and if anyone, kind of, doubts his street cred, he actually had a boxing match with a sitting senator back a couple of years ago, so you can, you can google Trudeau boxing match, um, So this guy's kind of weird, I mean, because he's, uh, you know, he used to be a white water rafting guide, and this, in a ski and snowboarding guide, and a whole bunch of things, it's not very typical for a prime minister or any sort of sitting, uh, head of state, uh, but anyway, I digress, um, you know, I'm not a, I'm, I'm not a Trudeau fanboy necessarily.

I was in the previous podcast, we were talking about how, you know, I think Canadians who are concerned about the state of science in Canada would be voting against the Harper government, whether that was for the NDP or the Green Party or for the Liberals. The Liberals won a majority, so that's the way things swung, I guess. So things have, they just released their budget, I think, I guess about three weeks ago, and there have been some goodies in there. So it's nice. We've seen some incremental increases in the funding agencies, such as the Canadian Institute of Health Research and the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council.

0:02:22 Thomas: Well,

0:03:16 Krakus: We've also seen some investment in green energies and research into greenhouse gases. We've seen the reinstatement of funding for things like the Experimental Lakes area and also kind of dribs and drabs for things like, you know, Canada and also for the Perimeter Institute, which is a theoretical physics institute. Also things like a stem cell research institute and the Brain Institute.

0:03:39 Thomas: Wait, I don't get it. So why aren't you a Trudeau fanboy? This sounds great.

0:03:43 Krakus: No, I'm not. See, I don't want to fall into the cult of personality.

0:03:45 Thomas: Maybe you should be. Maybe you shouldn't apologize. Maybe he should just be like, like, yeah, I'm a Trudeau fanboy. Sure.

0:03:53 Krakus: It's still early days.

0:03:54 Thomas: Yeah, that's true. I can see that.

0:03:56 Krakus: And one of the concerns that you and I discussed was that the cutting had been so consistently cut down every year that it would be nearly impossible to reinstate all the funding. And that's kind of what happened. So, you know, when they cut CHR by what was like 200 or 250 million, they've only increased it by like 22 million, right? So these are just incremental changes. None of these are permanent. So they're usually, oh, it's like $200 million for Genome Canada over five years or something like that. So these aren't permanent funding increases. They're all good. But, you know, we need to make sure that the state of science in Canada is stable. And this is a good first step, absolutely. There's another concern, though, too, in that we're in a pretty deep deficit right now. So part of that was due to the collapse of oil prices, since you and I spoke last, because that's a major export. But part of it's also just due to, I don't want to call it reckless spending, but a lot of stimulus spending,

0:04:08 Thomas: Well,

0:04:54 Krakus: As they call it, as you guys had back in '07, '08, and '09.

0:05:00 Thomas: Sure. It seems like that's spending for a good cause, I guess. But then again, I can't pretend like I know what's going on in Canada. I barely know what's going on here. One country at a time. Sorry. That's why I have you on here."

0:05:11 Krakus: Yeah. Well, that and, and, you know, Canada's economy is quite small. I mean, it's it's just a little bit smaller actually than all of California. So, you know, it's it's kind of, but, um, you know, there's only 35 million or so of us. So, um, yeah. You know.

0:05:19 Thomas: Wow. Oh, so it should be pretty easy. You probably keep track of all the transactions in Canada on one spreadsheet and just say, yeah. No, we're doing fine.

0:05:27 Krakus: Yeah. Well, actually we've got, see, I heard you and your brother talk about this, we got chips on our, on our Visa cards, we've had it for 10 years, so I don't know what's going on with you guys. We

0:05:41 Thomas: Oh, but aren't they the biggest pain in the ass? Or do you have some magical alien Canadian technology that makes them not?

0:05:48 Krakus: Got PayWave, I don, don't if you guys got that, so you just wave your card at the machine and it doesn't Well,

0:05:51 Thomas: Okay. Then what does the chip do? Because we have to put the stupid chip in the machine for an hour while a machine goes like, I think your card's in there. We're like, wait for five minutes. It's the most inefficient thing. So I guess if Canada, when you get advances like that, it takes a few years to trickle down here, the trickle down economics.

0:06:12 Krakus: It Yeah, well, it's gravity, right, you know, we're, I think

0:06:14 Thomas: Oh, yeah. Yeah, exactly. So eventually, if enough of the fancier machines fall down here from where you are, then we'll get them, I guess.

0:06:24 Krakus: Europe even got him like 15 years ago. So we're all slowly drunk over here the

0:06:25 Thomas: Oh jeez. When did you get the internet? The 70s or something? Like the full worldwide?

0:06:30 Krakus: Internet. Oh, I remember pre-internet era, so yeah.

0:06:33 Thomas: But anyway, we digress more. It sounds like, so if I were to sum it up, things are certainly better in terms of science funding in Canada, but there was a lot of damage done. And I encourage people, if you didn't hear that episode, go back and check it out. September, do you have an exact date? I can't remember.

0:06:42 Krakus: No,

0:06:52 Thomas: Well, in September, one of the eight or so episodes that were there. And it was pretty dismal. I was shocked at how little I knew about it, given the fact that it was pretty horrendous. It was shocking. I think people beat up on America a lot. I I think it's something that everyone loves to do, the rest of the world.

0:06:51 Krakus: I don't remember what it was, but When you're the biggest superpower in economy in the world, you're kind of, of the biggest target, right? So It's just natural, yeah.

0:07:17 Thomas: Yeah, exactly. Right, but it was pretty shocking, the stuff you described, and I thought, you know, we should be making fun of Canada more. But then you go and elect a beautiful man, or I guess you elect the party. Is that how it worked?

0:07:31 Krakus: We, technically we elect a member of parliament who belongs to a party, and they have a leader who gets to be prime minister. Three

0:07:37 Thomas: Right, so I'm glad that things are going better. Is there anything else you wanted to say on that before we moved on?

0:07:43 Krakus: Quick things. So Science is my focus, but there's, uh, three other things. We're in consultations right now for the legalization of cannabis, um, so hopefully before the, his term is done, uh, we're going to be well on the way to do that. So we're even talking about distribution methods, etc.

0:07:44 Thomas: Sure. Sure.

0:08:05 Krakus: There's also talk of electoral reform, which is something I talked about briefly, because the way our system works is kind of silly, because a minority of the people can vote in a majority parliament. And we actually have that with the liberals right now. And the third thing is that just today, we had our first draft legislation for physician-assisted suicide. So for people who are terminally ill or in great pain, they will be able to hopefully within a year get to have that opportunity or that option, let's just say.

0:08:39 Thomas: I was going to say, it's a bit hard to call it an opportunity, but yes, an option. Sorry, it was just a little too funny to not laugh at.

0:08:40 Krakus: Yeah, I misspoke there, right? So well, it's presence of mind. My mother died of cancer when she was 56, and the way she died was awful. So everyone

0:08:57 Thomas: Oh, here you go. Make me feel like an asshole for laughing. I get it. I get your MO, but yeah. No, it is an important topic for sure.

0:09:05 Krakus: Has a family member. It's not just me, right? So, uh, so yeah, that's that's all I got to say about that. So, uh, but before we do talk about some of the antibiotic stuff, I did want to mention one thing that Kevin Folta didn't say, and that was the um the aqua advantage salmon. So this is a genetically modified salmon that's been GMO'd to grow two to three times faster than conventional salmon, and it's

0:09:30 Thomas: In my idiot brain, I thought you meant like the fish would be faster. Like we're going to to produce the fastest fish. It's going to swim so damn fast. And then I thought, why would you want that? And then, I realized that's not what he meant. So, just catching everybody up on my thought process.

0:09:47 Krakus: Actually slower than conventional salmon apparently

0:09:48 Thomas: There you go. See, that's what you would want. You want a big, slow, dumb fish.

0:09:53 Krakus: Because of the rate of growth, it's something has to do with the muscle fibers that essentially can't go as quickly, but it makes for a fish that can be grown faster in aquaculture, and so when you were talking about fish genes with Kevin Folta, this is actually a case where they took a tomato

0:10:00 Thomas: Interesting.

0:10:11 Thomas: A tomato gene and put it in a fish.

0:10:13 Krakus: Yeah, it's got, you know, it's good, all your flavonoids in there, there, right? Yeah. They actually use the gene from a from a eel called a pout, from its antifreeze gene, in order to drive the expression of a Chinook salmon growth hormone gene, so that it can grow faster, but in order, so it doesn't cross, like if it gets out of the pens, so it does it cross with other salmon, it's actually triploid, which means that it has an extra set of chromosomes, so that if it tries to mate with another salmon, it won't be able to, because it's sterile, yeah.

0:10:16 Thomas: Yeah.

0:10:48 Thomas: That is so cool. I mean, I can imagine imagine the horrified people who are really into like natural everything. Like they must just be very horrified by this. But it's unfortunate because it's an incredible opportunity. I mean, it sounds like it's going to, well, okay, I guess we don't need to rehash all of this because we talked about it. I talked about with Kevin Falta. But I mean it is really depressing that I can imagine people reacting like that's some sort of horror show we're creating when in in reality, I mean, we are creating efficiency. We're helping feed people. I mean it's, it's anyway, all those things we said, go back and listen to those episodes.

0:11:26 Krakus: And that was great, you're a couple episodes on GMOs, we were actually fantastic, I think it was very informative and useful to to our crowd, uh so, uh, yeah, let's move on to some antibiotic resistance stuff uh, can I recall an anecdote, uh so, I mean, my interest in this is, uh, I mean, I, I'm not an expert in this, I'm the science that I used to practice, at least, is isn't related to this, but. But this touched me personally a number of years ago when my wife actually had a severe accident, boating accident in 2007, that led to an open fracture in her tib-fib. Her tibia and fibula, that's the lower leg, basically telescoped, created

0:11:32 Thomas: Thank you. Sure. Yeah. Well, take it away. Yeah, absolutely.

0:12:06 Thomas: Well,

0:12:07 Krakus: – it was like this horrible, horrible injury. Essentially, they were considering amputation. Anyway, fast forward a few surgeries, and she had these open wounds on her legs from a process called fasciotomy to prevent her legs basically suffocating from lack of blood flow. Because of these open wound, she had to have a lot of antibiotic treatment in order so that she wouldn't get affected. She contracted something called Clostridium difficile, which is a gastric bacterium that most of us have, but in his virulent form basically causes a form of chronic vomiting and diarrhea that leads to dehydration, and in elderly patients frequently leads to death.

So she was cured of this by a drug called Flagyl, and when she finally returned home, because she was up in the great white north in the middle of nowhere and some hospital in the boonies, when she returned home, her orthopedic surgeon noticed that she had maceration, or wounds, meaning that she looked like her wounds were becoming infected, so he prescribed something called clindamycin, which ended up wiping out her gut bacteria all over again, and she acquired the C-diff infection again, so in the end we had to hospitalize her again because she had lost so much fluid that she was losing consciousness and had started hallucinating, and she was treated with Flagyl all over again, but the Flagyl, the second time didn't work, and it meant that we had to move on to a second antibiotic, that's it's not quite the last line of the defense, but it's a more, it's it used for antibiotic

0:13:45 Krakus: Resistant bacteria of that particular strain, and at the time, because we were outpatients, we had to pay the cost, so cost about thousand dollars for the prescription, which translated to America, because American drugs tend to be two to five times more expensive, in the States would be, could be somewhere between two and five thousand dollars, so well

0:14:05 Thomas: What's this side note? What is this, the healthcare difference? I mean are you, so why wasn't that covered at all?

0:14:13 Krakus: So universal health care isn't quite universal in Canada, so if you're admitted to hospital, uh, everything is covered essentially, um, this is something my sister, who's a clinical pharmacist, would know better, but when you're out in the community, you usually have to pay for drugs yourself, unless you're a senior, I believe, or you get some sort of discounts if you're a senior, so then you need

0:14:16 Thomas: Uh-huh. Huh. So it's universal, Universal, but you weren't in the right universe. That's the problem. You were in a different universe.

0:14:32 Krakus: Yeah well part of this. This has to do with the fact that despite the pride many Canadians have in a universal healthcare system, there's a strong contingent and vocal contingent of right-wing opposition that wants to liberalize the healthcare system and essentially privatize it. So there's this constant push and pull between.

0:14:54 Thomas: Well, I think what we ought to do is I ought to call Canada out because last time that really worked for you guys. Last episode when I said, you know what, let's make fun of Canada more and I'll call out the fact that your universal health care isn't so universal. And then probably a few months from now, all of a sudden you'll magically have a brilliant system. That's at least learning from prior experience. That tends to be how it goes.

0:15:18 Krakus: That tends to be how it works. Well, yeah, healthcare costs in the US are actually quite astronomical. So similar procedures in Canada tend to cost a lot less, but that's because you have the insurance infrastructure in place that tends to tends to increase prices, right? But anyway, this is not a discussion about that, so, you know, that's my personal experience with it, but you know, this is a big problem. The CDC in 2003 released a, I guess it's a report you'd call it,

0:15:31 Thomas: Yeah. Well, I think I, sorry, I interrupted you. I don't know. Did you, did you finish the story necessarily? I mean, you were, so you're paying a ton, a thousand dollars, which was two to five thousand here, essentially could have been, for a drug that wasn't covered. And then I interrupted you. So what, what happened? I means, don't leave us hanging.

0:15:59 Krakus: She, she was fine at the end, right? So, that, we, we were assigned an infectious disease specialist, and, you know, she, she went back to for tests and things, and she's, she's all right, but the, the problem is is that that particular species of, uh, vancomycin resistant C. diff has now colonized her colon, and, uh, anyone who actually lives in close proximity with anyone else, at one point another, the their gut bacteria starts to converge because you, like it, as, as terrible as it sounds, it's impossible to avoid shit, well

0:16:02 Thomas: Okay. Huh. That's so interesting. Thing that's true, just any, and this isn't because of the, um, you know, the, the what disease, is that the right word, the, the virus, or what was it? Bacteria so it's it's

0:16:43 Krakus: It's a bacterium, right, so it this one's particularly nasty because it sporulates, right? So the spores are actually heat and cleaner resistant. You can only basically kill them with high heat or with bleach, right.

0:16:46 Thomas: Okay but but uh, what I was trying to ask is, this is normal, just for any two or more people that they're okay interesting Interesting.

0:17:02 Krakus: So yeah, for instance, let's just back up a bit. I mean, if you're, when you're born, if your born by natural vaginal birth, the gut flora that colonize you are acquired from your mother, because let's face it, the vagina and and the anus are very close together so, uh, you get those on your face, etc, and then you swallow them, and that becomes your your your basal gut flora Has

0:17:27 Thomas: Oh my God. That is so crazy. What a weird plan by God. But anyway. Okay. That is bizarre.

0:17:33 Krakus: Had tons to do with it actually, though, it's been shown that kids born by C-section actually have fewer, uh, or a decreased variety of gut microbes, yeah.

0:17:35 Thomas: Really? You know, I might've been born by C-section. I should count my microbes. That's interesting. I think I was born by c-section Wow. That's crazy.

0:17:43 Krakus: Sure.

0:17:52 Krakus: You can be genetically tested, um So. The point is is that if you're living with someone, especially if you are living with them intimately, then then you will at some point, like your gut flora will converge because you're swapping them all the time. So she and I essentially have to be careful now because she's had C-diff, she can't use certain kinds of antibiotics, so when she goes to the hospitals for anything, she has to let them know that she's C-diff and she's at a virulent form. They haven't said that about me, but I'm cautious about it too, just as a precaution, um so yeah, so we're fine, other than the fact that, you know, uh, if we, we take antibiotics, it might kill us, yeah.

0:17:53 Thomas: Yeah. Huh?

0:18:28 Thomas: Well, so it's, it is, I mean, it sounds pretty dangerous if something else, if you get something else, right? I mean, is that the issue that if you get some other, you know, have some other need for antibiotics, what are your options?

0:18:42 Krakus: And so, we tell, if we just see our normal family physician, or if we're in any other, if we see a specialist, if we need to get antibiotics, we let them know and they try to tater the the therapy accordingly, but uh, my wife got an ear infection, we're both divers so we're prone to ear and respiratory infections, and I actually had to call my sister, right, in in the office, and say, do you really think these drugs are the right drugs because She's more of an expert. Often the pharmacists know better than than the actual physicians in terms of what to prescribe in particular situations because they have the expertise in that.

0:19:05 Thomas: Oh, wow.

0:19:16 Thomas: Wait, did they end up being okay?

0:19:18 Krakus: Yeah, she was fine. So so that was okay, it's just something oh yeah, they were great, tripped you out and everything, yeah.

0:19:19 Thomas: Oh okay. No, I meant the drugs, yeah. Oh okay, that's interesting. Okay, so wow, where were we? So everything ended up okay, I'm really glad to hear it. That's a very horrifying injury and I was definitely cringing at the thought of it, but I'm glad everything turned out okay. But this relates, of course, to people who, just in case, didn't realize the whole discussion on antibiotic resistance, and that's the reason you emailed me about it, is I talked a little bit about that. I clarified because the first guest I had, Derek, sort of minimized that a littlebit. I kind of want to to catch up with him. I might message him and see what he thinks in light of all these episodes. Maybe that's a good idea. Maybe I'll do that. But he definitely minimized it. And I later emphasized that that was incorrect. And, and I tried to clarify, but, but you've gone even further here in that. So go ahead and continue.

0:20:22 Krakus: So just wanted to, so the CDC in the United States, um, has, you know, in a report from 2013, said that antibiotic resistance is a concern. So two million U.S. citizens every year acquire some sort of antibiotic resistant infection, and of those 2 million, approximately 25,000 die, and it's only getting worse. So the amount of antibiotic that's being used, I mean, not only in the medical system but certainly in the agricultural sphere, is increasing. So, as as you mentioned previously, in the United States is something like between 80 and 85 percent of all antibiotics consumed go into agriculture and around the world. I mean, there's a, there was a study a couple years ago and in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that showed that it's going to increase 67 percent by 2030, and especially in developing countries where the

0:21:01 Thomas: Sorry, what's going to increase? Just overall usage. Okay, okay. But not like in our country.

0:21:18 Krakus: Use of antibiotics yeah, particular in in agriculture and

0:21:22 Thomas: Yeah, okay, okay gotcha.

0:21:23 Krakus: In developing countries, it's going to double by 2030, which is approximately seven times faster than the rate of increase of the population. So it's all going to animal use, essentially.

0:21:37 Thomas: Yeah that seems to make it even more urgent. I forget if you mentioned this in your email but someone else I think commented, if it wasn't you, that you know why do this with antibiotics? What we're doing is this weird thing where, talk about unnatural, you know we're pumping, it's not to treat any disease.

0:22:00 Thomas: I in cattle, or rather we try to prevent them and all that, prevent infection. But this is just below therapeutic doses just to, what was it? It fattens them up and it increases the, what, the efficiency of what we feed them to what they produce, I think it was.

0:22:19 Krakus: Yeah, so it's something called the feed conversion ratio. So that's the, basically, every time you feed an animal to another animal or a plant to an animal, you're losing calories due to something called entropy, trippy as all the physicists know. And the idea is to decrease that number as small as you can. So the feed conversion ratio of say a cow is say 10 kilograms, or 10 times the calories of what you need in order to get one calorie out of beef. And cattle seems to be particularly bad for this. And for whatever reason, antibiotic use in the feed makes them grow faster. So it reduces that feed feed conversion ratio.

0:22:22 Thomas: Sure. Right. So we really ought to be doing this with genetically modified cattle. Let's learn from our fish example earlier on and figure out how to do this with genetically modified cows rather than this potentially dangerous method of pumping them full of antibiotics.

0:23:18 Krakus: Yeah, and I think, I mean, that's exactly what Kevin Folter was saying. I mean, the idea is to reduce your input. So for those of us who are concerned about greenhouse gases and the excess use of land, et cetera, we really should be considering something like GMO or the overall reduction in the amount of livestock that we have. I mean, because let's face facts, Americans and Canadians and Australians and most people in the developed world consume, seeing way too much meat, we don't need that much protein, right? So, I mean, that's another potential solution. I mean, but that still won't get to get rid of the antibiotic problem. So the U.S. as far as I know is one of the only developed countries that still allows the use of antibiotics for non-therapeutic reasons. Canada's either just phased it out or is phasing it out, and the entire EU doesn't allow antibiotics for it

0:24:05 Thomas: Once again, you're ahead of us and we have to wait for the regulations to trickle down to us, but eventually we'll figure it out.

0:24:13 Krakus: Well, you you guys produce a lot of a lot of food for export, right? And that's, it's a huge lobby. Uh the

0:24:18 Thomas: Oh, really? I thought we were importing it all into our guts straight down the... I didn't know there was any leftover to export. Is that true? Okay. News to me, yeah. Hey

0:24:29 Krakus: Case, yeah, um, so I forgot where we are.

0:24:33 Thomas: That's my job, make sure you forget where you are. Uh, well, I, I don't know, I mean, you you had kind of reached a a finishing point in your story and we had started talking about, uh, some of the different concerns with this, but I think one thing you you haven't addressed yet that might be kind of interesting is how these super bugs, you know, how that happened, like, like, where do they come from and how does that happen exactly? Because I think you had said that I maybe didn't describe it all the way, or was I wrong about it?

0:25:08 Krakus: Uh, well, you were talking in generalities, anyway. Right so I'm not I'm not calling you out, yeah.

0:25:10 Thomas: Sure. Well, yeah, of course. I'm not a scientist. Everyone knows I'mnot a scientist,

0:25:14 Krakus: I wasn't calling out for it for the details. Um, you you expressed some skepticism with the transfer of bacteria from, uh, from agriculture and livestock to to humans and that sort of understand well

0:25:26 Thomas: No, I think it was, I didn't think that the antibiotics, like we were getting a dose of antibiotics from the animal. That was, no, I fully expect that we could get other stuff like bacteria from them, right?

0:25:45 Krakus: We do actually get antibiotics. I'll return back to the first point, but just briefly while we're here, I did forward you a report from the FDA looking at the presence of antibiotics in milk, for example. Now, while the FDA concluded in that report that it's not a concern, something like 0.78%, I believe it was, just shy of 1% of all milk that they sampled, so they sampled 1,900 and somewhat different producers, actually had antibiotic contamination in the milk. So cows have to be treated for mastitis, et cetera, so they're taken off the production line, but evidently either unscrupulous persons or, you know, some sort of breakdown in the process allows antibiotics to get through.

0:25:47 Thomas: So yeah, yeah, go ahead.

0:26:31 Thomas: Wow.

0:26:31 Krakus: And some of them are up to 10 times the allowable level. So,

0:26:35 Thomas: See, this is Why I need to talk to people who actually know things about science. Now, can it, what about through meat? Because it would blow my mind if we can get somehow like a dose of antibiotics through eating meat of a cow that took them. But how about that? I might as well ask while we're at it.

0:26:52 Krakus: You know, I haven't looked into it specifically, but I'll tell you what, when you consume antibiotics, a significant proportion of them are excreted in urine, so if that's the case, you know but your kidneys have to filter those contents out, which means that circulating in your blood plasma prior to, prior to it being excretes, so it's utterly conceivable that that's making its way into the muscles, etc. I don't know if it's in levels that are considered unsafe, but I would not be surprised if it's present in the meat, I just, I can't be definitive about that particularly.

0:27:00 Thomas: Hmm. I don't eat a lot of cow urine. Oh, no, that's not where you're going. Okay.

0:27:30 Thomas: Okay. Okay. Interesting.

0:27:33 Krakus: So the main concern, I think, is is in the mechanism of transmission, because we tend to think of evolution as kind of a a process that goes from like a mother to a daughter in sort of what we call vertical transmission, but bacteria have something called conjugation, so this is the ability for two bacteria to exchange genetic material, and a lot of these antibiotic resistance genes in particular are carried on these antibiotic resistance plasmids or virulence plasmid that can be passed between each other, and they don't even have to be the same species.

So one of the papers that I sent you was from a Swedish group that showed that this one particular kind of plasmid that's known to spread antibiotic resistance called IncP1 is present, or rather can be transmitted between 20 different species of bacteria representing five different orders, so orders are higher up in the hierarchy representing, you know, less related organisms. So in this sense, you know, it's pretty freaky, because if you get some sort of vancomycin resistance into your caucus, it can spread to other kind of bacteria that are totally unrelated. Maybe they're not in your gut, maybe they cause flesh eating disease or something of the sort, uh,

0:28:53 Thomas: Flesh-eating disease is something I would prefer not to actually exist. I was hoping that was just a, you know, like a horror story, but that does exist.

0:29:02 Krakus: You've not heard of it, or have you heard of it, so

0:29:04 Thomas: No, I have. But how common is that? A flesh-eaten disease.

0:29:08 Krakus: I think it's, that's a staph aureus infection, oh, sorry, strep, strep infection, I'm being corrected here by my wonderful collection sister yeah, and, uh, it's, yeah, it's, it's, you know, we know that it exists, um, in the community, because we're seeing, by, we, I mean, people who work in the in the field are seeing this come off the streets, so to speak, so they see it errs and things like this. My sister, who works actually at a large teaching hospital in central Ontario, she says then in certain departments like orthopedics, they're seeing 25% resistant bacteria, and it's coming from the community infection, so these are not infections that are necessarily being incubated in the hospital itself, they're actually coming from the outside. So they're either coming from other people or they're coming from people contacting other things that are carrying these particular, uh, virulent bacteria, yeah.

0:29:11 Thomas: Oh, okay. Staph infection. Uh-huh. Uh-uh. By your referee, yeah.

0:30:08 Thomas: So the scary part about bacteria, it sounds like, just to try to put it into layman's terms and to see if I'm following you, it's not just like, oh, there's a dad bacteria and a mom bacteria, and when they love each other very much, they produce another bacteria, and over the course of thousands of generations, then maybe there will be a superbug. It's that they're so wonky, and I guess they're just having bacterial orgies all the time and doing God knows what, they could spread their genetic information in ways that I guess I wouldn't think of necessarily, or that your typical person wouldn't think of, and it makes them far more dangerous than we realize. Is that a good summary?

0:30:52 Krakus: Yeah, and you could think of, um, there could be bacteria that perhaps are unique to a particular kind of livestock or an animal that cannot be transmitted to people, but they can still pass on the pathogenicity or the antibiotic resistance via that conjugation process, so conjugal visions, yeah, so they go all Jaime and Cersei on them and, uh, you know produce these these horrible super bugs um so the the thing that that's freaking me out kind of as I started reading more about this is where it can be found like the the researchers who did that particular particular study with the 20 species transferring between each other. The bacteria that they used were isolated from biofilms from the North Sea. So this isn't from someone's farm. This isn't from someone backyard. It's not from a hospital. It is in the middle of the North sea. So, this is already

0:31:12 Thomas: Conjugal visits. Wow.

0:31:51 Krakus: Out in the environment.

0:31:51 Thomas: So wait, what, sorry, what's in the middle of the North Sea? I don't know, maybe, oh, oh okay, so there, that, well that's weird. So, wow, what is the explanation behind that? Just random?

0:31:54 Krakus: These antibiotic resistant strains. Well, probably the most consistent hypothesis is that it is coming from one of two sources. It either coming coming from effluent from sewage so it's coming from us and making its way into the environment or it's from the agricultural stream right and Other studies have shown like there's... there's a study actually done in my neck of the woods in southern Ontario actually by a former professor of mine who showed that there of the five tetracycline resistance genes that exist that are known to exist. All five exist in the effluent of the sewage plants in the town that he was studying this in. And in addition to that, they correlated strongly with multiple antibiotic resistance. So they were also resistant for up to five different antibiotics simultaneously.

0:32:17 Thomas: Wow.

0:32:52 Thomas: So, this is all a horror story. Do you have any, like, positive spin to put on it? Like, what do we do? And is, are we dead? Or are we, you know, what level of concern should the average person have about this? Do

0:33:07 Krakus: I think it should be a concern. So the thing is, when you go to your physician and they prescribe an antibiotic for you, first think about whether you need it, whether it's a natural bacterial infection maybe talk to them see if they should culture it um you know obviously speak to your health care professional I mean don't listen to some random dude on a podcast but

0:33:28 Thomas: You Know what's a Z-Pack is that antibiotics do You know what That is I'm Gonna check with a little bird on your shoulder and it Is see now This okay now I don't want to say I'm a hero but but listen uh my my last job I

0:33:28 Krakus: Uh Just A Second Zithromycin, it's an antibiotic, yeah But You Are Is that what you're gonna say you

0:33:49 Thomas: Exactly Well that's for you, it's not for me to judge. I I won't call myself a hero, but if if after hearing my very heroic story story, you know, if you're so inclined, sure, you can call me a hero. At my old job, I had, let's just say I had access to prescriptions easier than other people might because there were doctors around. And every time I would get a sniffle, they'd be like, let me, here, I'll write you a thing for a Z-Pak. And I was like, I don't know. I don't know about that. Maybe I don't want to do that. And I never did. I never took them up on it. Everybody there seemed to, and they would always do the Z-Pak thing, and I just thought, I don't really, I had heard something about this, like it's not necessarily good to take antibiotics just because you can, and so I didn't.

0:34:37 Thomas: And so again, I'm not going to use the word hero, but if other people want to, I am fine with it.

0:34:44 Krakus: Know what, and that's a very good thing, I'm I'm very similar because the vast majority of respiratory infections tend to be or upper respiratory infections colds are viral so antibiotics do nothing for them Right, so you're just propagating uh potential antibiotic resistance By Select, yeah

0:34:57 Thomas: Wow. So that's a big problem, and we really should avoid doing that because this sounds like a serious, it could be a serious deal, right? Right.

0:35:10 Krakus: This is a serious, like, let me just quote some statistics if I may I mean there's Uh I received from my my sister, this is just her hospital so maybe it's you know particularly bad but it's a teaching hospital so they probably see a lot of exotic stuff but um antibiotic resistance for instance instance, in virulentine coli against ampicillin here, they're only 55% effective, you know.

0:35:14 Thomas: Oh, please.

0:35:35 Krakus: Most of, no, there are, there aren't, I mean, but they're going up in the scale, and I can just see from the chart, you go to the next level and next level, and it goes from 81% to 70% to 91%, eventually you get 100% effectiveness. But when you finally run out of the last one, where are you going to go, right?

0:35:34 Thomas: Hmm. And there's, well, and I take it, there's no other course of action. I mean, are you just, oh, okay.

0:35:55 Thomas: Right. Right, right.

0:35:56 Krakus: And, you know, again, 25,000 people a year die from these kinds of infections in the United States, and it's probably going to be a lot worse in developing countries. You're talking about the Z-Pak stuff. I mean, I go to the Caribbean often, and you can find antibiotics just over-the-counter without a prescription. So, you Know, these are things that have to be addressed internationally. Nationally, the World Health Organization has put out bulletins saying, look, countries who do this don't do this anymore because it's not to be helping the situation.

It's had a call to action in terms of limiting the amount of antibiotics in the feed or not having them for non-therapeutic purposes. So, you know, these are all important things that have to be done. But, I mean, I think there are other considerations, too. As you mentioned, genetically modified organisms can, to some degree, mitigate this by either either having them designed specifically to be immune to particular diseases, but also to be able to grow faster so you don't need to promote growth. I think, you know, obviously limiting the amount of animal protein is probably a good idea for a person's health, but also for the ecosystem and for propagation.

0:36:24 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, that was an angle of your email that was definitely a challenge for me. I've had, I don't, I'm not a vegetarian. Are you vegetarian or no?

0:37:13 Krakus: No, I'm not, actually. And I'm visiting my parents right now who are very, very Eastern European, and I've eaten nothing but sausages for the last four days, so it's at

0:37:14 Thomas: Okay. Okay.

0:37:24 Thomas: So you're not only not a vegetarian, you're really not a a vegetarian currently.

0:37:30 Krakus: Present I try to be a Demeterian. At home I only try to eat meat for about half the week or so.

0:37:35 Thomas: Hey, that's a great approach. I think I've mentioned that before on my show. I, I think that's, if, if you can even limit it for a few days, better than nothing, right? I mean, it certainly has a significant percentage. If everybody did that, it would be incredibly significant. So yeah, that

0:37:35 Krakus: Yeah, absolutely, I think I mean alternate forms of protein might be good too. In my email I mentioned, you know, insect proteins becoming much more popular in a lot of developing countries. Traditionally insects compose a large part of the diet, and as they're making the demographic transition, they're going over to traditional European livestock or East Asian livestock that we, but you know, Amazon sells cricket flour, for example, you could put into your baked goods to increase the protein content.

0:38:21 Thomas: Sounds awful.

0:38:21 Krakus: It's, I haven't tried it, so I'm not going to endorse it, but feed

0:38:25 Thomas: Well, how, how about, uh, how bout chickens? Are those okay? I've, I've recently found out with doing some dieting and stuff like that. And chickens are just, chicken rather is just such an efficient, for me anyway, source of protein. How are we doing on that? Is that, is that better or worse than cows?

0:38:45 Krakus: Feed conversion ratio for chickens is actually quite low. It's something like on the order of like two to three, so no, low is good.

0:38:51 Thomas: So is that bad, is low bad? Oh,

0:38:54 Krakus: So cattle cattle is anywhere between five and ten with modern agricultural practice, so lower you can reduce it, the better it is, so I mean it's

0:38:54 Thomas: Low is good. Okay. Okay. So the, right. So this is, so that would, the ratio would be what, what to what? That's one, something of food to, to get, okay.

0:39:07 Krakus: The amount of calories essentially you have to put into the number get out,

0:39:11 Thomas: Gotcha. Gotcha.

0:39:11 Krakus: So so for every two calories you put in, you get one calorie out versus you know, at the extreme end of 10 with, with, uh, with cattle, yeah.

0:39:15 Thomas: Oh, that's pretty good. Well, if you weren't going to call me a hero before, I think you got to call him a hero now. I mean, I'm eating chicken. Good conversion rate.

0:39:30 Krakus: And, uh, we talked about this briefly before, but maybe you should eat a little bit more seafood, and, and not, I mean sustainable seafood at least, and things like, uh, lower on the food chain, things like mussels, and, you know, oysters and things that are filter feeders, and therefore you

0:39:44 Thomas: Can we do something about the fact that all the food that is best for everything is the worst? Can we figure that out? All the food is best. Best for the environment. Best free me.

0:39:57 Krakus: Need a kilo of mussels at a single sitting, so I don't know what you're talking about, I

0:40:03 Thomas: It's I need to figure out a way to, I, well, okay. I don't like seafood. I, I I'm weird in that way, but, uh, but, but even other stuff like vegetables and all that and whatever, you know, it's like, come on, can't we genetically figure that out to where we make the food that's good for us taste amazing. That's, that would be the biggest advance we could possibly do. It would fix everything, wouldn't it?

0:40:25 Krakus: Don't know, I mean, if, uh, there's... there's a couple podcasts out there to talk about foodies and things like this, and they're, they're trying to breed out things like bitterness and kale and, uh, and arugula and stuff, and for the people who are kind of foodies like me, I mean, we love those flavors. We love those bitter flavors and things, so we know, I get it for the, maybe those who don't like vegetables, getting Brussels sprouts to taste less like farts might be a thing, but you know, for the rest of us, now we kind of like like those complex, you know, flavonoids and and alkaloid compounds and stuff like that, so I I could see it going two ways, I think

0:40:42 Thomas: Hmm. Yeah, that's true. Fair enough. Okay. Okay, different approach. I do like those flavors too. I hear you on that. Maybe make other things, because there's some things that when I really, when I started dieting, I forget if I've talked about this before, maybe not on this show, but you figure out really quickly, oh crap, this is a billion calories and I didn't realize it. Bread, you know, stuff like that. Just basically carbs, stuff like that, and could we maybe make those somehow be fewer calories? So keep that the same, name. Well, you can keep your bitter tastes and all that, but we just make bread like 10 calories instead of 200 for a slice. So work on that.

0:41:38 Krakus: There's... there's a whole issue of satiety, right? So, um, you know, for years, um, there have been trends in the U.S. and Canada in particular about reducing carbs or fats or this and that, and in so doing, I think you reduce flavor. And And in that, you reduce satiety, so you feel like you've got to eat more. And I find it's the same with meat. Ever since I stopped consuming as much meat during the week, and then I kind of save up my Canadian pennies and buy myself some really, really high-end, you know, antibiotic and hormone-free beef at the end of the week, you know, I'd rather have that one steak a week than eat beef, you know, the entire week, because it just satisfies me so much more, you know. That's a whole issue. I mean, the organic thing, like Kevin Falter was saying, I mean the number of inputs that you need to put in is so much less efficient.

0:42:26 Krakus: But if we can overall cut down the amount of inputs by eating less meat, that would be good as well and good from the perspective of antibiotic use.

0:42:35 Thomas: Yeah, yeah. Well you paint a scary picture. I'm glad I haven't taken a lot of antibiotics, but man, that's scary stuff. It could be, I'm sure if someone wanted to write a horror story, I mean, it seems like all the pieces are there. It's some some sort of super bug that can't be killed, you know. But is there anything else you want to cover before we call it an episode?

0:42:57 Krakus: Yeah, just two things. One is something kind of freaky that's recently been discovered, and that's the ability for bacteria to transmit the resistance for an antibiotic called colistin. So there's an epidemic, I don't know if epidemic is the right word, but there's an increasing problem with something called carbapenem-resistant enterococcus, and essentially the last line of defense right now is this ancient antibiotic called colistin. And they found a bug in China that can actually pass it between different species of bug by that conjugation process, whereas before they thought it could just be transmitted vertically, and a bunch of this paper only came out this year, but a bunch of health organizations around the world, including Canada, started looking into various samples they had banked over the years, and they found that's already present in the food supply in Canada and the US and in Europe, so that's kind of frightening.

0:43:57 Thomas: Wow. Yeah.

0:44:00 Krakus: The other thing is, and we didn't talk about this in the email, but there's another way that we might be able to reduce antibiotic use, and that's by something called phage therapy. So phages are basically viruses that infect bacteria, and in Eastern Europe, in particular in the USSR after the Second World War, they invested a lot of effort into these phage techniques for mitigating the spread of bacteria, so rather than using antibiotics, they actually used viruses to kill the bacteria, so that could be, you know, another avenue to investigate. Unfortunately, there's just really poor clinical studies available on that right now, so it's not easy, well,

0:44:31 Thomas: Yeah, cool. Well, it is interesting that it could be, I mean, this may be unrealistic, but it could be that new technology like that or something, new advances, and all of a sudden we wouldn't even care about this problem, right? I mean if we could somehow find a way to use something else. But then again, who knows, maybe a new problem would be created by it. You just never know.

0:44:56 Krakus: Conspiracy theorists have suggested that the problem is, um, that some of these organisms, just basically, well, viruses and technical organisms, but some of these biologicals can't be patented or will be difficult to patent, and as such, pharma companies don't want to touch them because they can't make, getting money. Uh and so they're not being used, um, you know, this is also the reason why pharma, I'm not, I'm a big pharma guy, by the way, uh, but it's also a reason why antibiotic development is tough for pharma companies, because it costs so much to develop, and when things become resistant right away, your product is useless and you can't recoup your investment, right? So that's a whole issue, economists I

0:45:14 Thomas: Uh-huh. Hmm. Oh, wow. Yeah. I didn't think about that. Yeah, well, that's a major concern. I mean, it takes millions and millions. Well, is it billions or is it millions to create these things?

0:45:45 Krakus: Actually this up today, um, so something like four percent of all drugs that are developed in the lab make it to clinical trials, and of those, only five to fifteen percent, depending on the class of drug, make it through the trial process, and only 80 to 90 percent get approved by, in the United States, by the FDA. And clinical trials can cost anywhere between 20 and 150, 50 million dollars to run. So, you know, when your success rate is 0.5 percent and you got to blow 100 million dollars every time, it's not a lot of incentive. Thank

0:45:52 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah that's Very, that's an expensive habit right there. That's expensive drug habit, you might say. So, all right. Thanks so much, the time has flown by, but I really appreciate you coming on and explaining some of this stuff to me because it sounds like I got a lot, of stuff wrong or missed a lot of things and there's nothing I like more than being corrected on that and not perpetuating falsehoods. So thanks for that. It definitely is a grim picture in terms of antibiotic resistance, but hopefully eating less meat and maybe the fact that we're phasing out non-therapeutic doses, maybe that'll help, you know, and hopefully it won't be too big of an issue. Thanks again, Krakus.

0:46:59 Krakus: You very much, Thomas. I appreciate a lot. Oh, and I just want to give a shout out to the spare on my shoulder, Julia, my sister, who's been slapping me with various things.

0:47:00 Thomas: Oh, the pleasure was all mine, and I hope to have you back on again soon.

0:47:11 Krakus: Great,

0:47:11 Thomas: Ah, good. So you're keeping me in check, she's keeping you in check. We're good. We got a good buddy system going on.

0:47:20 Krakus: Cheers.

0:47:20 Thomas: Thanks.

0:47:33 Thomas: Alright, I want to thank Krakus so much for coming on. I really enjoy that. I love when I've got someone who knows what they're talking about, science-wise, and I get to crack a few jokes and do my best to interpret it and put it in layman's terms. That's fun. I hope you guys enjoy that format as well. It's not going to be every show, of course, but it's been really fun to do that. I think we both get a lot of info and and maybe have a fun time doing it. So thanks again, Krakus, and that's some scary stuff. I'm a little, I'm kind of worried about these superbugs. I'm gonna do my best. If I see one, I am going to stomp on it. And I think if I've got my science right from Krakus, I think that should do it. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you to all my patrons, old and new, and you can support the show if you'd like to at patreon.com/atheist.

0:48:27 Thomas: Pledge Pledge as little as a dollar a show, and you get early content, sometimes bonus content, and hopefully, I am recording this ahead of time, but maybe you even got some Eli Bosnick bonus stuff from when I was with him in New York. We'll see. I'd like to thank my all-time great pledgers, Kaylee Reiser, Zimu Zinu Jr., Adrian Borschoff, Jonathan Moyet, Jay Aldenwalt, Bangs Naughty Bits, Christian Jay, Peter Skelton, Brian Gearfort, Dale, Matt, Garrett, Lizzie, and Samantha. Thank you, thank you. Thanks for another great week, guys, and I will see you next week.