We’ve all had that moment when we temporarily become our own doctor. You have a cold or a sore throat, so you grab the antibiotics stored in your medicine cabinet conveniently left over from your last prescription.
If your stash is depleted, a trip to the local antibiotic dispensary (aka health clinic) will reward you with an ample supply if you beg enough. Since the onset of mass production of penicillin in the 1940s, the industry of antibiotics has been a carefree one, with usage varying from household hand soap to barnyard animal feed.
The application of a cream or the swallowing of a pill to cure ailments like gonorrhea or full-body infection is nearly miraculous. Doubtlessly, without antibiotics, countless lives would have been lost to disease, both past and present.
Unfortunately, our war on bacteria is causing collateral damage.
Antibiotic resistance is denoted by a bacterium’s ability to withstand antibiotic treatment. Every time antibiotics are used, bacteria that already possess resistance become the “last man standing.”
With no competition for food or space, resistant bacteria proliferate. These resistant strains are easily transferable from person to person. Resistance can then be passed from one bacterial generation to another or transfer laterally within the same generation.
Most bacteria that have resistance are harmless to humans and are often beneficial. As a testament, microbes inhabiting our bodies outnumber our own cells nine to one.
On the other hand, unchecked antibiotic use has enabled several life-threatening strains of bacteria, such as mycobacterium tuberculosis, to become completely resistant to every antibiotic in the physician’s stockpile. Other afflictions, such as staph infection, are becoming harder to treat as drugs become ineffective.
The germs are fighting back and appear to be winning.
In no way am I advocating the disuse of antibiotics. In treating many bacteria-borne illnesses, raising the percentage of bacterial resistance is an acceptable risk to save lives.
Unfortunately, much of antibiotic use is not acceptable. The Scientific American reports that only 50 percent of antibiotics are used for human treatment and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that only 100 million of the 150 million prescriptions are truly necessary.
Even more disconcerting, up to 80 percent of polled physicians recognize they have prescribed antibiotics against their professional judgment when demanded by patients.
Certain steps can be taken to end this recklessness.
Antibiotics should only be used to treat illness rather than as growth supplements for plants and animals. Patients should complete their full course of treatment as prescribed. They should neither request antibiotics nor use left over medication for non-prescribed uses. Physicians should not yield to patients demands and, if possible, only target a small range of bacteria with their prescriptions.
These precautions, coupled with the natural tendency of antibiotic-susceptible populations of bacteria to out-compete antibiotic-resistant populations, have the potential to veritably amend the problem of growing resistance.
Blaming each other is pointless because finger-pointing never produces a solution. Therefore, our main goal as antibiotic users and distributors is to move forward and educate ourselves on the intended and unintended results of administering these drugs.
The campus community is a small yet important component in gaining control over the abuse of antibiotics, and such control begins at a micro level. Every student has the opportunity to immensely impact the surrounding bacterial ecology.
Rest assured, men and women across the world are fastidiously at work to present new solutions to the quandary of antibiotic resistance. Until a viable solution can be reached, we must play our part at an individual level to dodge the danger of impending medical disaster.