Antibiotic Failure Will Kill 10 Million People a Year by 2050 | Mother Jones
▻http://www.motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2015/01/antibiotic-failure-will-cost-10-million-lives-annualy-2050
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If your goal is to to ruin the effectiveness of antibiotic drugs, I can think of two efficient ways. One would be to wildly overprescribe them—say, to people suffering from a cold virus, even though antibiotics work their magic on bacterial pathogens, not viral ones. The other would be to feed daily, low doses of them to animals confined by the thousands in vast indoor facilities. In both cases, you’re creating ideal conditions for bacteria to evolve to survive the drugs we throw at them: A percentage of bacteria withstands the chemical onslaught, and passes genes on to ever-heartier next generations.
Unhappily, both of those practices—overprescription to people and routine use on animal farms—have been in play pretty much since the emergence of antibiotics after World War II. And so we have entered an age of widespread antibiotic resistance—on our way to what what Thomas Frieden, of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has called a “post-antibiotics era.”
