Drug resistance represents a public health problem that, to date, is still not easy to imagine, yet, according to researchers, by 2050, 10 million people a year will die because they are unable to be treated with antibiotics. Here’s what you need to know
Drug resistance increasingly presents itself as a threat to public health and our survival, let’s understand together what it is, how it is possible and what we risk and can do.
From penicillin to today: the birth of antibiotics
It’s been less than 100 years and we’ve already ruined everything
It was in fact 1928 when Alexander Fleming discovered by chance the existence of a mold that contained a substance capable of blocking bacteria.
The mold in question was of the Penicillium genus and I’m telling you about penicillin, the first antibiotic in history.
2050 like 1944: no cures, more deaths
Today we know that, by 2050, 10 million people per year will die due to drug resistance (cancer deaths will be 18.5 million, to give you an idea of the situation).
This means that in 25 years we risk living as they did before 1945, the year of the first use of penicillin in Italy.
At the time, people died of a lot of diseases that today we consider trivial: small infections, diarrhea, but also typhoid and pneumonia (as happens today in some parts of the world but we are not aware of it, or we don’t care).
We will therefore also die due to bacteria, called “super bacteria”, which are resistant to drugs and which are already among us.
Drug resistance: what it is and how bacteria evolved
Drug resistance, or antibiotic resistance or antimicrobial resistance, occurs when the bacteria that we usually defeat with antibiotics learn to recognize drugs and fight them, making them ineffective.
Bacteria have evolved in such a way as to be able to avoid or make ineffective what killed them, i.e. antibiotics.
In practice, what today are infections of little importance, treatable with drugs, tomorrow will not only be incurable, but lethal.
The cause of drug resistance
All this is the direct consequence of the abuse of drugs that we make as if they were sugar-free sweets: we take antibiotics both directly, when we want to cure ourselves of an infection, and indirectly, since they are now available
Abundant traces of these substances in the water we drink and the food we eat.
The bacteria that already exist and threaten us
The 5 bacteria we will be most afraid of are:
Just to name a few
And what can you do?
Reduce the use of antibiotics to strictly necessary cases and hope that scientists find a replacement solution,
