Antibiotics Have Come To The End Of Their Life!

When I was a kid everything I had a sore throat the doctor would prescribe antibiotic to me. I still remember the name of the antibiotic as "amoxicillin". It was very effective. One course of it my sore throat would be gone. Recently, I had a sore throat and took it again, but now it has lost its function and had to take another type of antibiotic.

This is what we call "antibiotic resistance"!

Bacteria, like any living organism, they evolve for survival. Anything we do or the environment does to try to kill them, they will eventually discover ways or find ways around those. So bacterial resistance is largely inevitable.

According to Dr. Arjun Srinivasan, an associate director at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Prevention Antibiotics, U.S.A., we're now living in the post-antibiotic era. The misuse of antibiotics in medical field and farming has caused bacteria to develop resistance to many types of antibiotic.

We’ve fueled the fire of bacterial resistance by overusing and misusing of antibiotics. The more we use an antibiotic, either in patients or in livestock, bacteria would expose to it more. We then create more opportunity for them to develop resistance.

We are quickly running out of therapies to treat some of the infections that previously had been eminently treatable. There are bacteria that we encounter, particularly in health-care settings, that are resistant to nearly all — or, in some cases, all — the antibiotics available.

For a long time, there have been newspaper stories and covers of magazines that talked about “The end of antibiotics, question mark?” Well, now Dr. Srinivasan says we can change the title to “The end of antibiotics, period.”

We’re here. We’re in the post-antibiotic era. There are patients for whom we have no therapy, and we are literally in a position of having a patient in a bed who has an infection, something that five years ago even we could have treated, but now we can’t. …

The interview with Dr. Srinivasan was very long. You can read more in Dr. Arjun Srinivasan: We’ve Reached “The End of Antibiotics, Period”