The rampant, often-frivolous use of antibiotics over the past half-century has made us dramatically more vulnerable today.
A looming catastrophe … one our planet faces due to long-term human intervention in the natural world … the impacts of which are already being felt … though the real damage lies ahead, the issue could be ameliorated through urgent action to bring about policy and behavioural changes. Surely we are talking about global warming, the hot issue on everyone's minds these days? No, in fact we are referring to an equally significant though vastly under-discussed threat confronting the world today: antibiotic resistance, the phenomenon of bacteria becoming immune to antibiotic medication.
While global warming is all about the damage wrought to macro-ecosystems by human excess, antibiotic resistance is the story of what we have done over the decades to the world's micro-ecosystems. It is about the ways in which our entire planet seems to be developing resistance to the presence and activities of the human beings living on it, in the ways in which the largely invisible world of bacteria and viruses have become resistant to our attempts to control them. In other words, while global warming threatens to bring the skies down upon our heads, antibiotic resistance, silent and faceless, is crumbling the ground beneath our feet.
In fact, the problem of antibiotic resistance has been around since the historic discovery of penicillin – the so-called miracle drug – by Alexander Fleming in 1928. Penicillin came into mass production in 1943, and since then numerous classes of increasingly powerful antibiotics have been developed. Prior to Fleming's discovery, people commonly died of a variety of bacterial infections; by conquering these, antibiotics were quickly established as the cornerstone of modern medicine. Today, from heart surgeries to organ transplants, no major surgical procedure is possible without the use of antibiotics to keep infections under control.