[christkv]

Its a topic that comes up again and again. We are getting resistance against modern antibiotics. There are a ton of old antibiotics that have been out of use for decades that should be retested as possible weapons. Evolving resistance comes at a cost for bacteria and over time they might loose resistance against previous antibiotics.

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmicb.2014.0055...

The problem is no pharmaceutical wants to spend money on qualifying an out of patent antibiotic that can be copied by any generics manufacturer.

We need a joint governmental founding initiative across the eu and us and any other countries to fund qualification of old antibiotics as well as developing new ones.

[oa335]

> Evolving resistance comes at a cost for bacteria and over time they might loose resistance against previous antibiotics.

This is known as the "ecological fallacy".

> reversion to sensitivity is neither an immediate nor necessary outcome of selection simply because a resistant pathogen is no longer in an antibiotic-laden environment [1]

[1] "Why Do Antibiotics Exist" - https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/mBio.01966-21

[Fomite]

...that is not how I've ever heard "the ecological fallacy" used, and this is what I do for a living.

[oa335]

What is your line of work and how is concept of “the ecological fallacy” used there?

[Fomite]

Epidemiology and disease ecology, particularly of antimicrobial resistant pathogens.

The Wikipedia entry for it gives the definition I've always seen: "An ecological fallacy is a formal fallacy in the interpretation of statistical data that occurs when inferences about the nature of individuals are deduced from inferences about the group to which those individuals belong."

[oa335]

My mistake, this is not an example of “ecological fallacy”, but instead a line of reasoning that explains the assumptions that led to an “ecological fallacy” type of error.