The apocalypse is coming, doctors and scientists warn, but it will enter the planet from the wrong side from which it is expected.
Professor Dame Sally Davies, Chief Medical Officer in the United Kingdom, warns that the planet is facing a global threat from new antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
In the medical literature of recent years, a rather unusual for medicine metaphorical term "nightmare bacteria" has appeared, applied to microbes that are ABSOLUTELY RESISTANT to any antibiotics.
The so-called nosocomial strains have long been well known to microbiologists. These are quite common bacteria, but with a fairly strong resistance to one or another antibiotic most commonly used in a particular clinic. As a preventive measure, it is usually recommended to use in the clinic (in the infectious or surgical department) either the entire spectrum of antibiotics at once, or change the main set of drugs from time to time. This approach is quite sufficient, since if a strain acquires resistance to penicillins, it is easily killed by a cephalosporin antibiotic and vice versa. However, the "nightmarish bacteria" that medicine has encountered in recent years are like ordinary microbes, but microbes that are resistant to everything.
Amesh Adalja, senior fellow in health safety at Johns Hopkins University, calls the genes of these microbes "truly the worst of the worst":
“There are certain bacterial genes that are more disturbing than others that are much more difficult to treat. These genes are hidden in the bodies of many, many patients in American clinics, and when they get into the hospital, mutant microbes instantly jump out, spreading throughout the hospital."
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According to official statistics from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), about 2 million Americans are infected with antibiotic-resistant bacteria every year and 23,000 of them die after that.
Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, compares this problem to a "slow tsunami":
“This is not some kind of infectious outbreak, not an acute crisis that is sweeping over us like a wave. We just see these rare instances of microbial resistance to antibiotics from time to time in remote areas of the world. The statistics are not threatening and very small. But a year or two passes - and this bacterium, resistant to everything, suddenly spreads all over the world!"
Professor Dam Sally Davis, not holding the position of the head of the clinic, but managing the entire health sector of a large European country, sees the problem on a much larger and threatening scale. The problem is that not yet the most dangerous and widespread bacteria are becoming resistant. For example, bacteria that cause pneumonia, inflammation of the skin, infections of the intestines and urinary tract, antibiotic-resistant strains appear among them. But there are other bacteria as well. For example, the bacterium of the bubonic plague.
Fortunately, medieval Europe did not know antibiotics, so the plague epidemics, although they killed many, nevertheless, bacteria did not kill everyone and responded well to treatment, in particular, with essential oils such as oregano oil, for example. The bacteria were not resistant.
Today, outbreaks of this disease are treated with antibiotics, thereby producing genes in bacteria that are resistant to the drug used. These genes among bacteria migrate, mix and this will continue until sweat, until a strain appears that, in the end, will collect all these resistant genes. As a result, in the same USA, not 23,000 a year will die from simple colitis, which cannot be treated, but the world will receive an epidemic that will destroy people all over the planet. The disease will simply be unstoppable!
Professor Davis warns that if people globally do not take any action now, the world will sooner or later get a post-antibiotic Apocalypse. In the next few weeks, Professor Davis will launch a campaign in the UK, hoping to keep antibiotic use in the country to a minimum. However, this, as the professor herself admits, will definitely not be enough, since similar actions should be taken globally around the world - only then can the situation be somehow changed:
“What we are faced with today in our inaction will result in a terrible post-antibiotic apocalypse,” Davis said at the Berlin Medical Conference. “I don’t want to tell my children that I didn’t do my best to protect them and their children. This antimicrobial resistance is killing people right now. But if we do not take decisive action around the world, things will get worse and worse. We need real work on the ground to change the situation, or we risk ending modern and modern medicine, and modern civilization in general."