posted on Aug, 18 2010 @ 04:57 PM
12 August 2010
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.
Just 65 years ago, David Livermore's paternal grandmother died following an operation to remove her appendix. It didn't go well, but it was not the
surgery that killed her. She succumbed to a series of infections that the pre-penicillin world had no drugs to treat. Welcome to the future.
The era of antibiotics is coming to a close. In just a couple of generations, what once appeared to be miracle medicines have been beaten into
ineffectiveness by the bacteria they were designed to knock out. Once, scientists hailed the end of infectious diseases. Now, the post-antibiotic
apocalypse is within sight.
Hyperbole? Unfortunately not. The highly serious journal Lancet Infectious Diseases yesterday posed the question itself over a paper revealing the
rapid spread of multi-drug-resistant bacteria. "Is this the end of antibiotics?" it asked.
Streptococcus pyrogens bacteria. Photograph: S Lowry/University of Ulster/Getty Images
Unfortunately over the years antibiotics have been over subscribed to patients, it is as much the patients fault as the doctors, patients think
antibiotics are a cure all and many have insisted that their doctor subscribe them needed or not. It is my understanding that the more you take the
less effective they become, at some point your immune system rejects them totally.
It is hard to imagine a world without antibiotics, as mentioned in the article this isn't hyperbole, the day will come when we will get diseases with
no cure, seems we are going backward, we can hope in the next 65 years they will come up with something better.