If giant plumes of gurgling methane don’t keep you up at night, then try this: England’s chief medical officer recently warned government officials that we are running out of antibiotics that are effective against drug-resistant bacteria.
This means that even the most innocuous infections that used to be knocked out by antibiotics could kill us since bacteria have adapted faster than we can produce new drugs, the BBC reports.
Prof Dame Sally Davies told a committee of MPs that even a routine operation can turn into a deadly ordeal since we are running out of antibiotics that can effectively combat increasingly resistant bacteria.
Prof Davies said: “It is clear that we might not ever see global warming, the apocalyptic scenario is that when I need a new hip in 20 years I’ll die from a routine infection because we’ve run out of antibiotics,” according to the BBC.
She is scheduled to submit a list of potential solutions amid calls for more resources devoted toward what the World Health Organization (WHO) corroborates as a growing problem that affects all reaches of the globe.
“Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is resistance of a microorganism to an antimicrobial medicine to which it was previously sensitive. Resistant organisms (they include bacteria, viruses and some parasites) are able to withstand attack by antimicrobial medicines, such as antibiotics, antivirals, and antimalarials, so that standard treatments become ineffective and infections persist and may spread to others,” the WHO states on their website.
“AMR is a consequence of the use, particularly the misuse, of antimicrobial medicines and develops when a microorganism mutates or acquires a resistance gene.”
Every year roughly 150,000 people die worldwide as a result of 440,000 new cases of multi-drug resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB), the WHO reports. And MRSA – commonly known as “staph” is responsible for a growing number of hospital deaths.
The Virginia State Department of Health warns that almost all important bacteria in the United States have also become resistant to antibiotics.
“Antibiotic resistance is due to the misuse and overuse of antibiotics. Antibiotics are often over-prescribed due to demands from patients, time pressure on physicians, and uncertainty about the diagnoses.”
So what can we do about it? Don’t use antibiotics unless absolutely necessary and make sure to use them exactly as the doctor prescribes them. Meanwhile, some farmers are turning to oregano oil to keep chickens disease-free.
:: BBC
Image of young boy with bacterial infection, Shutterstock
Author: Tafline Laylin
As a tour leader who led “eco-friendly” camping trips throughout North America, Tafline soon realized that she was instead leaving behind a trail of gas fumes, plastic bottles and Pringles. In fact, wherever she traveled – whether it was Viet Nam or South Africa or England – it became clear how inefficiently the mandate to re-think our consumer culture is reaching the general public. Born in Iran, raised in South Africa and the United States, she currently splits her time between Africa and the Middle East. Tafline can be reached at tafline (at) greenprophet (dot) com.
First off, you WANT antibiotics given to livestock, other wise, we would be like a lot of countries, and you would get parasites living in your meats. REMEMBER, most livestock eat raw herbs. you know, the kind that people put feces on to fertilize? So you would trade parasitic infections that eat your brain for systemic bacterial infections (if thats the cause, and its not). WHEN YOU COOK THE MEAT IT DESTROYS THE ANTIBIOTICS DEE DEEE DEEEEEE.
Second, a lot of these mysterious bacteria are caused by hospitals themselves, and NOT people taking too many antibiotics. They reuse certain equipment. Not to mention, some personell aren’t following proper sanitization techniques. OH they will charge you though, as though it was brand new. In fact, we learned about many bacteria in clinical microbiology that just love to grow on catheters and drainage tubes. these types of bacteria are NATURALLY resistant to many anti-microbials The infections arise when nurses don’t change out the patients catheters in a timely fashion. I remember being in the hospital for 3 days and NEVER ONCE did they change mine. I am now infertile and suffer chronic infections that no drug will get rid of.
How about the WHO doing a report on the correlation between these “AMRs” and people who have been in the hospital up to a 2 months prior (some bacteria take THAT long to grow). I bet it would be quite high.
Also, some of these infections, when not hospital related, are due to either non compliant patients who don’t take their medication rights, or young and immunodeficient patients. Rarely are these types of infections the cause of contagion. I bet once you take out the risk factors, these incidences among normal healthy adults is very low.
A possible solution would be to use UV light/gamma radiation to clean hospital rooms.
Also, don’t buy animal products from companies that use antibiotics in their feed. “…80 percent of all antibiotics used in the United States are used in food animals (and the vast majority of this use is for animals that are not sick).” http://www.nrdc.org/food/saving-antibiotics.asp
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=5787866&page=1
Substances harvested from cannabis plants could soon outshine conventional antibiotics in the escalating battle against drug-resistant bacteria. The compounds, called cannabinoids, appear to be unaffected by the mechanism that superbugs like MRSA use to evade existing antibiotics. Scientists from Italy and the United Kingdom, who published their research in the Journal of Natural Products last month, say that cannabis-based creams could also be developed to treat persistent skin infections.
Cannabis cures.
Interesting, but we might want to be aware that the human race lived on earth a long, long time before the first antibiotic, penicillin, was invented. Sure there were plagues, and a lot of people died from them; but the rest of the species survived.
This probably what will happen in this “worst case scenario” and the end result may be the culling of the human population down to what it really should be: 3-4 billion instead of the 7 billion we have now.