Scary Disease Woman (aka ‘Maryn McKenna’) has a great article on buying medical antibiotics in large volume over the counter. You should read the whole thing, but this screenshot is pretty terrifying:
Yes, colistin, the last line antibiotic, can be purchased at about $10 – $40 per pound (that’s about 400 daily doses for a large man). Equally disconcerting is the ability to purchase cephalosporins and ciprofloxacin over the counter at around $15 – $20.
This is not an educational problem, but a regulatory one. Fix this.
mikethemadbiologist
And some of those are explicitly labelled as agricultural feed additives!
In case you missed it Colistin resistance has just shown up here in the UK, as well as in China.
wow, considering how much I have to pay for them in my research lab perhaps I should start a sham farm just so I can buy cheap antibiotics