According to a recent study published by the The Lancet Infectious Diseases and reported recently through NPR, total doses of antibiotics sold globally went up 36% from 2000 through 2010. The good news in that statistic - many people have been given lifesaving treatment. The bad news in that statistic - such use just makes drug-resistant infection more common, and more hard to treat.
Get a medical professional alone and ask them what keeps them up at night, and odds are they'll convey how close we are to running out of last-resort antibiotics that can be used to treat infections when all other resources have failed. They'll likely also convey that it is just a matter of when, not if, a worldwide pandemic occurs.
We're already seeing so much of that play out. Just think of the friends and loved ones that you know that have been in the hospital (a supposed sanitary condition) and have contracted a horrible infection. For some, it may even have done them in.
What a moral dilemma: Either withhold life saving treatments for some in the hopes of keeping antibiotics effective, or use them and run the risk of the human population being ravaged by the super bug that gets created.
Scary stuff.
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