Antibiotic Resistance

Antibiotics resistance is a growing issue and the arsenal to combat these potentially deadly microbes is dwindling. Antibiotic resistant bacteria have become a "medical catastrophe".

- ChiroWeb.com

In the early 1980’s complacent scientists celebrated the conquest of communicable diseases with the use of antibiotics. It was said that smallpox was eradicated, tuberculosis was cured, and penicillin controlled all infections. However, twenty years after the Surgeon General of the United States claimed that “we can close the book on infectious diseases”, hospitals are seeing increasing numbers of virulent forms of bacterial, fungal, and viral infections. Today, infectious diseases are the leading cause of death worldwide and the third leading cause of death in the United States after cancer and heart disease. The emerging pathogens have gained resistance over currently used antibiotics, evolving ways to bypass or overcome therapies.

Last year the World Health Organization warned that “the level of resistance to drugs used to treat common infectious diseases was reaching a crisis point and, if action was not taken soon, we must anticipate a return to the pre-antibiotic era with the entire population facing a ‘superbug’ catastrophe for which no effective treatment exists” (British Medical Journal, 320:1624, June 2000). “Such organisms could make antibiotics useless by as early as 2010.” As a result, society may find itself returning to the days before penicillin, when millions of people routinely died from staph, strep, TB and other bacterial infections.