On March 11, 2020 WHO officially declared COVID-19 a pandemic. Regardless of your opinion on the COVID pandemic, it has been virtually impossible to have read any current events over the past year (sports, entertainment, local news, etc) that weren't COVID-centered. Whether it's rising cases, vaccine hesitancy, people refusing to wear masks, state shutdowns, states not shutting down, sporting events being cancelled, politicians testing positive, hospitals being at capacity, daily death toll, increase in testing, holidays with family members being "super-spreader" events, etc, etc, etc. Unless you've just disconnected from society, you've heard this all day, everyday. It's relentless. Again, this isn't about how you feel about the pandemic, or the media's coverage of it, it's just stating the fact that COVID has permeated our consciousness on a daily basis for over a year.
However, something we never read about is the overuse of antibiotics, and the looming consequences of such. When the time comes (2050?) that one can't go to the doctor and get rid of simple bacterial infections, such as a UTI or bronchitis, because the overuse of antibiotics, people are going to be in some serious trouble. At the time of writing, there have been almost 3 million COVID deaths in roughly a year and a half. According to WHO, 10 million people will die every year from antimicrobial resistance (meaning, bacterial infections that would have been treatable/cured with antibiotics, but became resistant due to evolutionary mutations by the bacteria due to antibiotic overuse).
Imagine what it will be like in a time when you contract a bacterial infection, such as a UTI or strep throat, that today nobody even thinks twice about, and you can't go the doctor and can an antibiotic to get rid of it and possibly end up hospitalized fighting for your life:
GENEVA — Big pharmaceutical companies have not come out of COVID-19 looking like model global citizens. Pfizer has been accused of bullying South American governments after demanding they put up military bases as collateral in exchange for vaccines. Meanwhile, Bill Gates persuaded Oxford University to sign an exclusive deal with AstraZeneca for its new offering, rather than allow it to be copied freely by all. The British/Swedish multinational quickly announced it would fall 50 million vaccines short on its first shipment to the European Union.But what if there were a looming health crisis that could make COVID look almost minor in comparison? The World Health Organization (WHO) has been warning of just such a case for some time now, predicting that antimicrobial resistance will kill up to 10 million people every year by 2050 — almost four times as many as the coronavirus has killed in the past 12 months.“Antibiotic resistance is one of the biggest threats to global health, food security, and development today,” they write, noting that without effective antibiotics all manner of conditions — including pneumonia, tuberculosis, gonorrhea, and salmonellosis — could become far more deadly. Drug companies are making this situation worse by encouraging the overuse of our precious stores of antibiotics, particularly in the Global South and also by refusing to invest enough resources into creating new ones.
The more antibiotics are used, the more resistant bacteria become to them, meaning that humanity must guard its reserves and slow down the pathogens’ adaptive evolution by using them only when necessary. Between 2000 and 2015, antibiotic consumption decreased by 4% in rich nations but increased by 77% in developing ones, and their overuse has become rampant across the world. The poorer enforcement of medical laws in these countries leads manufacturers to “adopt unethical marketing approaches and develop creative ways to incentivize prescribing among healthcare providers,” in the words of Dr. Giorgia Sulis, an infectious disease physician and epidemiologist at McGill University, Quebec.A second way in which giant pharmaceutical corporations are aiding the spread of resistance is their refusal to devote the necessary resources towards replenishing stores of new antibiotics. Investment in the area has rapidly dwindled. “The big problem is that we do not have any novel antibiotics in the pipeline that we can expect to see in the near future… So we really have to protect those that we do have,” Dr. Gautham told MintPress.And while the Global South overprescribes antibiotics, in the West farm animals are pumped full of them, farmers even giving them to healthy animals so they can be packed tighter in ever-increasing herd sizes. The WHO notes that in many countries, 80% of medically important antibiotic consumption goes to farm animals and has strongly recommended a wholesale reduction of the practice.The negative effects of this looming scenario are profound. Since the adoption of penicillin in the 1940s, the widespread use of antibiotics is estimated to have extended average life expectancy by 20 years. Dr. Gautham noted that “as antibiotic overuse keeps increasing, then all those antibiotics that we have today will slowly become ineffective against even the most common infections.”
Thus the conditions of the past will become the maladies of the future. Cancer treatments such as chemotherapy, cesarean sections, and other common surgeries will be in major jeopardy, as they require antibiotics to prevent any post-surgical and opportunistic infections. Healthcare costs will spike as conditions that were treatable in a few days will draw on for weeks, and some cases may not be recoverable. As Dr. Sulis warned:
For such a profound problem, which threatens the very foundation of modern medicine, the story is receiving barely any attention in the media. Indeed, so uninterested is the press in pharmaceutical profiteering accelerating superbugs that media-literacy group Project Censored chose it as one of their top 25 most censored stories of 2019-2020. The only substantial corporate reporting on the unethical sale of antibiotics, their research showed, was a single 2016 investigation by The New York Times.
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