SuperbugSuperbugs: are we returning to an era where bacteria are a major killer without a cure?
Every time bacteria come into contact with antibiotics there is the possibility that through a process of natural selection, they may evolve to evade the drugs, creating what is referred to as “superbugs.” These superbugs can often not be killed by antibiotics. In the early years of antibiotic development researchers were able to come up with enough new antibiotics to replace the ones that we had lost to resistance, but this is no longer the case.
There have been bacteria on this planet for at least the last 3.5 billion years. For the entirety of our species’ existence we have relied on bacteria to aid us in breaking down food, whilst being helpless to guard against their wrath whenever we had a bacterial infection. It wasn’t until the late nineteenth century that more powerful microscopes lead us to understand what bacteria were and how the infections spread, in what was known at the time as ‘germ theory.’
Understanding how bacteria made people unwell led us to greatly improve hygiene; with large government programs to build sanitation systems, doctors started to wash their hands and utensils, and people started to drink clean water. These changes, along with other medical innovation, lead to dramatic improvements in people’s health: in 1900 one in every 125 Americans were killed every year by infection and life expectancy was just 46; by 1941, it had risen to 65 and the number of people dying annually from infections had fallen to just one in 500. It was in this year that humans finally took the upper hand in our battle to stave of infection, when a research team in Oxford demonstrated how penicillin can cure bacterial infections. By 1955 just one in every 1670 Americans were killed by infections annually (the rate has plateaued since then).
Over the next few decades, antibiotics transformed modern medicine, not only allowing us to treat people who had bacterial infections, but also creating a safety net for other areas of medicine. Doctors can now treat other illnesses through surgery or by using drugs that have the unfortunate side effect of greatly lower immune systems (such as chemotherapy), with the knowledge that if someone picks up a bacterial infection, it can be treated.
