eBay recently stopped the listing and sales of Fish Antibiotics on their platform. They were concerned that some eBayer's were purchasing these products for human use and not for treating bacterial infections in aquarium fish.
There has been speculation that the FDA will crack down on this product line as well, only permitting there use with a prescription from a Veterinarian.
Comments
Austin on November 15 2016 at 04:03PM
If the FDA thinks I’m gonna pay a vet to diagnose my fish then the FDA can pay for my vet bill. Seriously, this is going a bit out to have vet diagnose a fish ailment! I guarantee if I had my vet come and diagnose my fish they wouldn’t know what to do. I used to wholesale fish to Walmart and other retail outlets, there is NO WAY we could pay a vet to come out for a visit when tanks needed medicated. By the time a vet showed up you could have lost a small fortune in livestock! This is insane BS, do you know R&D on antibiotics is basically at a halt!
Concern continues to grow over the emergence of bacteria resistant to current antibiotics. Things are getting so alarming that political leaders such as President Barack Obama, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and outgoing UK Prime Minister David Cameron have made antibiotic resistance a top healthcare priority in their respective countries.
Despite this crisis, many major pharmaceutical companies–the very organizations best poised to help solve this challenge–remain on the sidelines. With such an obvious medical need, why are these companies shying away from committing R&D resources to this fight? The answer lies in pharma’s business model. Companies thrive by growing their product sales. But, from a financial perspective, the potential market for new antibiotics is lackluster at best. Physicians are cautious about prescribing such drugs especially if a particular one is the last line of defense against certain bacteria. By using new antibiotics sparingly, doctors try to maximize the time it takes for resistance to develop against a new drug.
However, such conservative prescribing patterns, while important and necessary, don’t help a company’s revenues. As a result, companies prefer investing ads a panel to check on a bacterium’s resistance to an antibiotic in an antimicrobial resistance and characterization lab within the Infectious Disease in areas like heart disease, diabetes or cancer where an important new drug will be robustly utilized.
There have been a number of proposals put forth designed to solve this problem. These tend to invoke new business models, which would seek to create global structures involving intergovernmental agencies designed to coordinate and prioritize efforts. These are interesting ideas that merit exploration. However, getting all the necessary parties to the table to hammer out the rules to make this workable is going to take a lot of time and will likely add a good deal of bureaucracy.
Read more about this story at Forbes:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/johnlamattina/2016/06/29/a-proposal-to-spur-pharma-rd-investment-into-antibiotics-for-superbugs