The Antibiotics Apocalypse: Part ii

How can Bacteria spread immunity?

Continued

Today, we treat this powerful medicine as a commodity instead of as the game-changing achievement of science that it is. This has lead to a strange disconnect: hundreds of millions of people still don’t have access to antibiotics in developing countries, while in other parts of the world antibiotics are prescribed too freely and taken without care.

Antibiotics should be a last resort drug, not something you take because your cold is annoying.

Another serious problem is antibiotic use in meat production. At any particular time, humanity holds between 20 and 30 billion animals as livestock. To make meat cheaper, many animals are held in horrible conditions, in very tight spaces and in unhygienic conditions, the perfect breeding ground for disease. So many animals are given antibiotics to kill as many bacteria as possible and prevent them from getting sick. Because a cheeseburger has to cost ten rupee. Unsurprisingly, as a result of this system, we have created more and more bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics. To counteract this, we use different antibiotics and we have another secret weapon: there are specific antibiotics that are used to wipe out bacteria that have developed resistance. There are strict rules for using these to avoid the creation of a superbacterium or so we thought.

In late 2015, scary news arrived from China. Resistance against Colistin a last-ditch antibiotic, had been discovered. Colistin is an old drug and was rarely used, because it can damage the liver. So there was little resistance against it, which made it a great antibiotic of last resort for certain complex infections that occur in hospitals to fight bacteria that have become immune to a whole bunch of other drugs. Bacteria resistance to Colistin is very, very bad news. It might destroy a last line of defense and lead to a whole lot of dead people.

How could this happen?

Millions of animals in Chinese pig farms have been given Colistin for years. Resistant bacteria developed, spreading first from animal to animal, and then to humans without being noticed. On an average day, there are over 100,000 flights on Earth, kind of connecting every human on the planet. By creating the modern world, we have also built he infrastructure for a dangerous pandemic.Still, we don’t need to panic just yet. Bacteria evolve, humans do research, new antibiotics are developed as old ones become obsolete, technology is advancing everyday. The problem is real and serious, but the fight is far from over. If humanity plays its cards right, superbugs might turn out to be not very super after all.

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