“In September, Dr. Thomas Frieden, the director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, issued a blunt warning: “If we’re not careful, we will soon be in a post-antibiotic era. For some patients and some microbes, we are already there.””

The main idea of the article, “Imagining the Post-Antibiotics Future”, is nothing foreign to me. I found this article extremely interesting as I am an Immunology and Infectious Disease major and anything about disease makes me excited. Although, the content of this article is nothing to fangirl over. I agree with everything this article states because I have heard it all before in TV specials, journals, article, and classes.

Antibiotic resistance has slowly been creeping into the media more and more over the past few years. I first heard about “super bugs”, microbes that have acquired pan-resistance, in my freshman seminar class. A microbiologist himself, my professor showed the class a documentary on super bugs and how they are leading to antibiotic resistance. The video told stories of people who traveled to less developed countries and contracted dangerous microbes through various transmission sources. It showed the patients on their death beds and the horror of the doctors realizing that they have run out of antibodics to try. Every since this, I have been interested in antibiotic resistance. This seriousness of this issue and the challenge to overcome these bugs intrigues me.

As mentioned in the article, catalyzing this threat is antibiotic overprescription and misuse. After discovering penicillin, an antibiotic the revolutionized medicine, Sir Alexander Fleeming warned that “Every inappropriate prescription and insufficient dose given in medicine would kill weak bacteria but let the strong survive.” However, it appears that his advice was ignored because to this day both things are still happening. The United States is one of the biggest culprits of overprescription.

So many people seek antibiotics for the simplest of diseases. They do not realize that this overuse is leading to resistant bacteria at a fast rate and can endanger the whole population. I have witnessed this overuse first hand recently when my friend got a cold and called his mom (a nurse practitioner) to prescribe him antibiotics. This was a cold he would have gotten over in two weeks at most but he wanted to take the easy way out, ignoring the negative implications

The statement in the article about how antibiotics are becoming resistant faster terrifies me; “Fleming’s prediction was correct. Penicillin-resistant staph emerged in 1940, while the drug was still being given to only a few patients. Tetracycline was introduced in 1950, and tetracycline-resistant Shigella emerged in 1959; erythromycin came on the market in 1953, and erythromycin-resistant strep appeared in 1968. As antibiotics became more affordable and their use increased, bacteria developed defenses more quickly. Methicillin arrived in 1960 and methicillin resistance in 1962; levofloxacin in 1996 and the first resistant cases the same year; linezolid in 2000 and resistance to it in 2001; daptomycin in 2003 and the first signs of resistance in 2004.” The future is looking scarier then I want to admit and the fact that few people are trying to develop new antibiotics is even worse.

As grim as this article is, it is articles like this that make me excited about my major and I can’t wait for the day when I can try to make a difference as a doctor.

*Can click pictures to enlarge!

Picture 1: Flickr: DES Daughter

Picture 2: Flickr: Ester Simpson

Picture 3: DraftAB

Picture 4: Mentioned article

All quotes in this post are from the article mentioned