Imagine walking through your garden and being scratched on your face by a thorn… Nowadays you wouldn’t expect to end up covered in boils and losing an eye with the only outcome looking like death (This is what happened to Albert Alexander before he became the first man to try penicillin!).
Almost all of us have taken antibiotics at some point for an ear infection, a sore throat, or maybe even after an operation, but imagine if that sore throat could lead to heart failure?
This was the case before the 1930s when catching a simple infection meant life or death. It’s an era that seems long gone after 70 years of miracle drugs that cure within 7 days, but it is also an era that is once more fast approaching as bacteria evolve to out-manipulate our defences against them and as we gradually run out of options…
By as soon as 2050 (well within most of our lifetimes!) we may have to survive without quick-cure antibiotics, so what does this mean for the future of the modern world?
The thing is, bacteria have had a few advantages on us lowly humans from the start:
1. They can share DNA with other bacteria as easily as you can share out a chocolate cake (Well… maybe cake is a bad example for sharing, but you get the idea…)
2. A whole colony of bacteria can replicate itself in 20 minutes, while it can take humans up to 10 YEARS to create effective treatments! Less than ideal.
3.They’ve been winning from the beginning by defeating every antibiotic answer so far and even today infections that can’t be treated by antibiotics kills 700,000 people worldwide every year.
The picture below shows how just one type of resistant bacteria (NDM) has spread globally from 2008 to 2015:
So what about life for everyday people in the years to come?
Surely the people who are at risk are in intensive care in hospitals or not able to access appropriate treatments? In actual fact, antibiotics support much of modern life…
Of course the first to be affected would be those with weakened immune systems who are unable to fight off even small infections such as those undergoing chemotherapy or with diseases such as AIDs.
But without antibiotics what seems safe now could be life threatening once more. Before the miracle drug, 1 in 100 women would die in childbirth and a huge 3 out of 10 children in hospital would die of an infection such as pneumonia. Routine operations such as a knee replacement could lead to deadly infection and most invasive surgeries would become pretty impossible too.
Give it 50 years and this might cause you as much trouble as it does pain…
Watch Maryn Mckenna talk on the topic for more info.
Edited by Lucy Jackman
Sources:
http://www.quickmeme.com/meme/3r3jj8
http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/01918/boy_1918174c.jpg
http://www.public.asu.edu/~shaydel/images/personnelcartoon.jpg
http://www.ted.com/talks/maryn_mckenna_what_do_we_do_when_antibiotics_don_t_work_any_more#t-998183
http://www.collegian.com/2015/09/mad-science-with-mads-the-science-behind-a-papercut/132053/