When antibiotics first came out, nobody could have imagined we'd have the resistance problem we face today. We didn't give bacteria credit for being able to change and adapt so fast.
It is the end of the road for antibiotics unless we act urgently.
In learning to utilize antibiotics for the control of human and animal diseases, the medical and veterinary professions have acquired powerful tools for combating infections and epidemics.
I grew up on antibiotics. Every ailment - sore throats, earaches, flus - warranted a trip to the doctor and in most cases some kind of prescription.
Why do physicians prescribe powerful antibiotics? Generally not because our patients ask for them. Most people who come in with a sore throat would be just as happy leaving my office with a prescription for Chloraseptic as clarithromycin.
Antimicrobial resistance is on the rise in Europe and elsewhere in the world. We are losing our first-line antimicrobials. Replacement treatments are more costly, more toxic, need much longer durations of treatment, and may require treatment in intensive care units.
When we prescribe antibiotics for a strep throat, it's not even for the strep throat. It's for the complications of the strep throat.
While consumers may be more shocked by pink slime or the feeding of Prozac to poultry, the routine feeding of millions of pounds of human antibiotics to chickens presents a much graver threat.
Some countries that grow lots of pork, like Denmark and the Netherlands, are either eliminating antibiotics or reducing them. We have to do that. Otherwise we'll create such antibiotic resistance, it will be just terrible.
Some experts say we are moving back to the pre-antibiotic era. No. This will be a post-antibiotic era. In terms of new replacement antibiotics, the pipeline is virtually dry. A post-antibiotic era means, in effect, an end to modern medicine as we know it. Things as common as strep throat or a child's scratched knee could once again kill.
We've been scared from using antibiotics and antivirals out of some kind of weird sense of communal responsibility to keep bugs naive to our powerful weapons.
Widespread use of antibiotics promotes the spread of antibiotic resistance. Smart use of antibiotics is the key to controlling its spread.
Antibiotics are so pervasive that they are often prescribed preemptively, as soon as patients report symptoms, before a diagnosis is made.
Antibiotic resistance is as old as the dirt that coats our planet.
There is a glaring reason that the necessary total ban on nontherapeutic use of antibiotics hasn't happened: The factory farm industry, allied with the pharmaceutical industry, has more power than public-health professionals.
The more we look at drug resistance, the more concerned we are. It basically shows us that the end of the road isn't very far away for antibiotics.
Medicine, which I wouldn't be without, has also been a force for... less good. For example, if you look at our mishandling of the immune system, using antibiotics in children and avoiding infection, we've certainly increased the risk of asthma.
Antibiotics are a very serious public health problem for us, and it's getting worse. Resistant microbes outstrip new antibiotics. It's an ongoing problem. It's not like we can fix it, and it's over. We have to fight continued resistance with a continual pipeline of new antibiotics and continue with the perpetual challenge.
