I know I can't. I was born with weak lungs very prone to infection, and spent time in an incubator after being born. Had I been born in the 1860's rather than the 1960's, I would have died at birth. And scores of asthma attacks throughout childhood with more than a few trips to the ER all convince me that I should have died a dozen times over. So many damed pills. So many rounds of antibiotics.
So if I am right now very reckless with my health, and if right now antibiotics are not available to me, I will die in less than a year from a respratory infection. And if I am very careful it will only take 3 years 'til I meet the bug with my name on it. Either way, I will die sooner than I should have if antibiotics were to simply disappear.
Sooner than I should have??
Meh ... I shoulda' died at birth. (Darwin gets ya' every time.)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/aug/12/the-end-of-antibiotics-health-infections
So if I am right now very reckless with my health, and if right now antibiotics are not available to me, I will die in less than a year from a respratory infection. And if I am very careful it will only take 3 years 'til I meet the bug with my name on it. Either way, I will die sooner than I should have if antibiotics were to simply disappear.
Sooner than I should have??
Meh ... I shoulda' died at birth. (Darwin gets ya' every time.)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/aug/12/the-end-of-antibiotics-health-infections
Are you ready for a world without antibiotics?
Antibiotics are a bedrock of modern medicine. But in the very near future, we're going to have to learn to live without them once again. And it's going to get nasty.
Sarah Boseley
The Guardian, Thursday 12 August 2010
[snip]
The era of antibiotics is coming to a close. In just a couple of generations, what once appeared to be miracle medicines have been beaten into ineffectiveness by the bacteria they were designed to knock out. Once, scientists hailed the end of infectious diseases. Now, the post-antibiotic apocalypse is within sight.
Hyperbole? Unfortunately not. The highly serious journal Lancet Infectious Diseases yesterday posed the question itself over a paper revealing the rapid spread of multi-drug-resistant bacteria. "Is this the end of antibiotics?" it asked.
Doctors and scientists have not been complacent, but the paper by Professor Tim Walsh and colleagues takes the anxiety to a new level. Last September, Walsh published details of a gene he had discovered, called NDM 1, which passes easily between types of bacteria called enterobacteriaceae such as E. coli and Klebsiella pneumoniae and makes them resistant to almost all of the powerful, last-line group of antibiotics called carbapenems. Yesterday's paper revealed that NDM 1 is widespread in India and has arrived here as a result of global travel and medical tourism for, among other things, transplants, pregnancy care and cosmetic surgery.
"In many ways, this is it," Walsh tells me. "This is potentially the end. There are no antibiotics in the pipeline that have activity against NDM 1-producing enterobacteriaceae. We have a bleak window of maybe 10 years, where we are going to have to use the antibiotics we have very wisely, but also grapple with the reality that we have nothing to treat these infections with."
And this is the optimistic view – based on the assumption that drug companies can and will get moving on discovering new antibiotics to throw at the bacterial enemy....
[snip]