Protecting a Valuable Natural Resource: Antibiotics
Nov 15, 2012, 4:15 PM, Posted by Ramanan Laxminarayan
Ramanan Laxminarayan
Antibiotics are a shared resource for protecting the public’s health. Since their introduction in 1941, antibiotics have saved millions of lives and transformed modern medicine. But the more you or I—or anyone—uses antibiotics when we don’t need them, the more we contribute to the development of antibiotic-resistant microbes—and to the frightening prospect of a world where most infections don’t respond to antibiotics. If we don’t take collective action soon, this unthinkable scenario could become a reality.
To many who have heard these warnings before, antibiotic resistance seems like an evergreen issue that is always off in the distance. That is simply no longer true. We lose more people to just one kind of drug-resistant infection—methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus—than to HIV. The cumulative toll from all resistant infections in the United States is much greater. Each and every one of us has a responsibility to protect the arsenal that we have—those antibiotics that are still effective—to fight deadly pathogens.
