The end of antibiotics, period?

Twenty years ago, I wrote a paper for my high school biology class on the not-much-discussed topic of antibiotic resistance. What I learned seemed like science fiction; due to overuse and improper use of antibiotics, we faced a return to the dark ages before penicillin, when a chance infection could easily spell death and doctors were largely helpless in the face of them. But after writing my essay, life went on. When I got sick, antibiotics were readily available. I remained wary of antibacterial cleansers and other bacteria-bashing products, but essentially, it seemed that I’d been a bit alarmist. And yet, over the years, the very real problem of antimicrobial (the more expansive term) resistance has continued to grow. First the problem was largely confined to hospitals where healthcare-associated infections that have become increasingly resistant to the agents commonly used to treat them. More recently, resistance has spread strongly to community settings outside the hospital. This moves us into a new age, similar to the bad old one we’re mostly too young to remember (say, pre-1936 when sulfa drugs were first employed). As Dr. Arjun Srinivasan of the  Centers for Disease Control and Prevention puts it in a recent PBS doc (here’s the edited transcript), we’re reached “the end of antibiotics, period.” Dr. Srinivasan goes on to mention a few of the less-obvious implications of it becoming increasingly difficult to treat bacterial infections that over the past sev...
Source: Open Medicine Blog - - Category: Medical Publishers Authors: Source Type: blogs