Antibiotic
resistance
What is it?
Now that we are using antibiotics for everything, the
viruses are adapting to the medicine that we are using to get rid of them. This
means that some of the antibiotics are no longer effective or are not working
as well as they use to because the bacteria is getting used to it. Some
microbes are changing faster than antimicrobials can kill them. As a result,
it’s once again possible to get an infection for which there is no sure cure.
This is called antibiotic resistance, another way of explaining this phenomenon
is that antibiotic
resistance occurs when an antibiotic has lost its ability to effectively
control or kill bacterial growth; in other words, the bacteria are
"resistant" and continue to multiply in the presence of therapeutic
levels of an antibiotic.
One cause of antibiotic resistance is the fact that farmers
are giving their animals a bunch of this and that we are after consuming all of
it.
Are you ready for a world without antibiotics?
Antibiotics are a bedrock of modern medicine. But in the
very near future, we're going to have to learn to live without them once again.
And it's going to get nasty. If we really
lost antibiotics to advancing drug resistance — and trust me, we’re not that
far away — here’s what we would lose. Not just the ability to treat infectious
disease; that’s obvious but also the ability to treat cancer, and to transplant
organs. Any treatment that relies on a permanent port into the bloodstream for
example kidney dialysis would no longer be safe at all. We would not be able to
do any major open-cavity surgery, on the heart, the lungs and the abdomen.
We’d lose the ability to treat people after traumatic
accidents, as major as crashing your car and as minor as your kid falling out
of a tree. We’d lose the safety of modern childbirth: Before the antibiotic
era, 5 women died out of every 1,000 who gave birth. One out of every nine skin
infections killed. Three out of every 10 people who got pneumonia died from it
and that’s where we are headed again.
And we’d lose, as well, a good portion of our cheap
modern food supply. Most of the meat we eat in the industrialized world is
raised with the routine use of antibiotics, to fatten livestock and protect
them from the conditions in which the animals are raised. Without the drugs
that keep livestock healthy in concentrated agriculture, we’d lose the ability
to raise them that way. Either animals would sicken, or farmers would have to
change their raising practices, spending more money when their margins are
thin. Either way, meat, poultry, pork — and fish and seafood, also raised with
abundant use of antibiotics— would become much more expensive.
Read the article here:
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/doctors-enlisted-turn-tide-antibiotic-resistance
Questions:
1) Are
you ready for a world without antibiotics? Why do you think so or not so?
2) What else
would antibiotic resistance affect?
