Previous Cassandra series posts: A.I. — Global Warming
At the risk of cliché, it’s hard to overstate the importance
of antibiotics. While it’s unimaginable to us, the children of the golden age, the medical advances we take for granted, such as organ transplants, surgery,
and safe childbirth are all possible only because
of antibiotics.
I’m not recusing myself from that group, if this
NYT article is to be believed, 11% of skin infections were fatal back before
antibiotics. Which doesn’t seem realistic to me, but I don’t have the standing
to refute the datum. Maybe they just mean serious infections, not my acne and
cat scratches, otherwise I’ve really beaten the odds.
At any rate, without antibiotics, many surgeries have a
decent chance of being life threatening. Even with sterile conditions, you’re
still making a big hole for bacteria to get in, with antibiotics consistently used
during surgery to prevent infection. And even that’s not enough, the World
Health Organization estimates
that “Of every 100 hospitalized patients at any given time, seven in developed
and 15 in developing countries will acquire at least one HAI [Health-care Associated
Infection].”
I guess I kind of skipped over the major problem on this one,
so let me rectify that: we are running out of antibiotics. Not just for the “MSRA”
staph infections that occasionally make the news every now and then, but in
general. We’ve already seen bacteria that are immune to every antibiotic we
have, and the others are continually growing and refining themselves, actively
working to develop resistances to treatment. Not only do bacteria acquire
resistances through ordinary mutation, but they can also acquire resistances
through plasmids. Essentially, a bacterium that develops resistance can spread
it to other unrelated species of bacteria, making the development of any resistance
a highly undesirable outcome from our perspective.
Like in any evolutionary arms race, bacteria that develop
resistances are more successful. It takes constant progress on our end to
maintain our superiority. At the moment, this is not happening, and scientists are
predicting the practical end of antibiotics within a few decades.
 |
| It is difficult to justify investment in new antibiotics when they quickly stop being useful |
One of the glaring problems is that the bacteria are
developing resistance more quickly. Quicker than we can develop new drugs, at
least. The reasons for this are likely due to the overuse and misuse of
antibiotics, a topic for which a comprehensive accounting is beyond the scope
of this short essay. One salient fact: the vast majority of antibiotics used are given to animals in their food, in order to keep them healthy in the foul conditions of factory
farms. Use of antibiotics in this way also raises the percentage of body fat in
the animals. Similar results occur when antibiotics are (over)used with
children. Additionally, an estimated 50% of all antibiotics administered to people are used unnecessarily, to treat colds and flus. Suffice it to say, we are ever the architects of our own demise.
What will the future look like? The past, likely enough.
Diseases once untreatable (Tuberculosis, Gonorrhea, Cholera, E coli, etc.) will
be untreatable once again. I want to stress that this is not speculative, it is
already occurring around the world. Species of gram negative bacteria
have been the first
to develop resistance
to all known antibiotics, but more will inevitably follow. Our children will die from infections that
our parents shrugged off, and, in one more way, the world will be darker and more
dangerous.
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