By Marc Mendelson
Antibiotics have been a miracle of modern medicine. From a chance finding in 1928 to the modern day, millions of people have benefited from these life-saving medicines.
This week, the world marks World Antibiotic Awareness Week – both a celebration of the remarkable contribution that antibiotics have made to global public health and a clarion call to action to ensure their continued usefulness.
The case for a clarion call is clear: overuse and misuse of antibiotics in humans, animals, and the food production industry has seen bacterial resistance to antibiotics surge in recent years.
Without antibiotics, treatments that we take for granted for common diseases such as pneumonia or urinary tract infections will be lost. Effectively, we are seeing the end of modern medicine slowly being played out.
But we can act together to alter the situation.
How it works and why it matters
Humans and bacteria are symbionts – we live in a close physical association, to the advantage of both. Every human is host to trillions of bacteria that live in our gut, on our skin, and in other body areas. Some of these bacteria are naturally able to resist the action of one or more antibiotics through specific resistance mechanisms they possess and thus have a survival advantage.
