I did my Air Force pilot training in West Texas in the heart of the Permian Basin, an incredibly rich, oil producing region. The area enjoyed oil booms and suffered through oil busts. A resident posted a sign during one of the down periods, “Please, Lord, just one more oil boom. We promise not to screw it up this time.” The sign speaks to the propensity of human beings to be shortsighted and to make a mess of things. That propensity has been on full display when it comes to the use of antibiotics.
Antibiotics have been around since the dawn of recorded history. Our ancient forebears rubbed moldy bread on wounds to treat infections. It was not until the late 1800’s, however, that real breakthroughs began to be made. Penicillin was discovered in 1928 and sulfa drugs soon after that in the 1930’s. These discoveries ushered in the golden age of the treatment of bacterial infections. Millions of lives were saved.
Unfortunately, we were not good stewards of this gift we had been given. Doctors began to prescribe antibiotics at the first sign of a cough or sniffle. Patients could not be bothered to take all of the pills the doctor prescribed and would often stop when they felt better, which left some bacteria to survive and infect another day. Extra pills were tossed into the toilet where they moved on to the larger environment. Farmers and ranchers began to give antibiotics to their cows, chickens and pigs to keep them healthy. Over a period of a few decades, antibiotic use exploded until they were everywhere. The golden age could not last.
The bugs we are fighting were on this earth long before humans arrived on the scene. For over a billion years bacteria have been fighting and dying, reproducing and evolving. They are built to survive in the worst conditions this planet can offer, from the bottom of the ocean to the tops of the highest peaks to the frozen wastes of Antarctica. There are trillions of them alive at any given moment. Antibiotics were just another hurdle for them to leap and leap they did.
Every time bacteria came into contact with antibiotics and the antibiotics didn’t kill every single bacterium, the ones that survived developed some resistance to the drug and passed it down to their offspring. All of our bad habits and unwise use of antibiotics meant that there were more surviving bacteria every day. The day when payment comes due has arrived.
Every year, more and more people are dying from bacterial infections that would have been successfully treated in the past. Researchers have found that even villagers in the most remote regions of the Amazon rain forest harbor drug-resistant bacteria. The problem is not going away and will only get worse. The latest estimate is that 39 million people will die of antibiotic-resistant infections between now and 2050. To put it another way, deaths due to these infections will increase by 70% in the next 25 years. The majority of these additional deaths will be among the older members of our world.
Just because you are not old does not mean you are going to be spared the consequences of these developments. Not only will common infections be more difficult to treat, many medical procedures will be more risky because of the decreasing effectiveness of the antibiotics now used to prevent infection.
While it is too late to restore the effectiveness of the most common antibiotics, it is not too late to slow the rate at which the bugs develop future immunity. The wise use of antibiotics is essential and the changes must be world wide, if we are to save what effectiveness we have left.
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