The Rise of Superbugs

Humanity is slowly engineering it’s doom. Negligently and irresponsibly, and the good part of us don’t even know it, or fail to see the big picture. This shall be brought out by the thing we thought to be a miracle in it’s dawn; Antibiotics.

The first antibiotic substance was Penicillin, discovered from the fungus Penicillium Notatum by Sir Alexander Fleming in 1928. Before this, molds and other plants were used to treat infections - though not always successful. The discovery of penicillin from the fungus perfected the treatment of bacterial infections such as, syphilis, gangrene and tuberculosis. Very soon after, this inspired a wealth of antibiotic research resulting in antibiotics becoming widely accessible for the public by the mid-to-late 1940’s.

Before this, however, bacterial infections were a nightmare. These infections were often incurable and deadly, some even causing dreadful disfigurement, such as Syphilis. Even paper-cuts were a danger, as millions of different kinds of bacteria were and still are everywhere. Chances of death during childbirth were a lot higher than they are now, and the average person’s life expectancy was mean 52 years old from 1900-1940. Tuberculosis was a huge problem - 174 out of every 100,000 people in the U.S. died from tuberculosis in 1900-1920.

Today, bacterial infections aren’t a worry to your everyday stranger. Diseases like tuberculosis are now rare, an estimated 3 cases for every 100,000 people were reported last year, 2016. There are well over 100 different types of antibiotics in circulation, bought and used. Antibiotics have become so practical that in some countries antibiotics were assigned to people with the common cold, and antibiotics are frequently by intensive animal farming companies in order to keep their meats and dairy bacterium and (used wrongly for this matter) virus free, for the sake of “higher quality” products. But, doctors are now being urged to stop giving antibiotics to patients not particularly needing any, as result of a previously ill-considered factor - Drug resistance in bacteria.

This happens in a mutation, in which the most common destroys the antibodies before they can breach their cell wall. The presence of drug resistance in bacteria has been steadily increasing due to the misuse of antibiotics for all the aforementioned reasons in the previous paragraph. One particularly scary instance of superbug has shown up - called Klebsiella pneumoniae (KP). This bacteria is the most common drug resistant bacteria found in the United States, and recently, a strain of this bacteria was found to have drug resistance to 26 antibiotics - including intermediary resistance to tigecycline, a drug developed in response to emerging antibiotic resistance. Talk about nightmarish, this resistance to our once called “miracle drugs” is now one of the most probable things to impact humanity, I’d say at least rivalling climate change.

There are solutions to this - physically ripping the cell apart, maybe even a super dose of antibiotics to overload the bacteria, but this may have untold effects on the patient and I believe it possible for resistance to grow even greater after many proposed solutions. There are four core actions to prevent this resistance: Preventing Infections, Tracking Cases, Improving Prescriptions of Antibiotics, and Developing New Drugs and Diagnostic Tests. But until these actions are partaken, the world needs to be truly brought to the light on this issue, to spread word of it’s malevolent potential. Think about the world we lived in not too long ago, 70 years,