The End of Antibiotics

Based on personal experience, I feel like I can basically control my sicknesses because of all the drugs we have today. But, that idea is slowly (actually pretty quickly) dwindling away. It seems like if I get a cold, strep, or really anything, I can just take an antibiotic and adios! But not anymore. We’re all becoming resistant to basically everything! I went to campus health just a few weeks ago and the doctor didn’t even know if I had a sinus infection or not, but gave me antibiotics, just in case (don’t worry I didn’t take them). It all came into check with me when over the summer I had an ENDLESS stream of UTIs and could not get rid of them no matter how hard I tried. Turns out, I was resistant to basically all of the antibiotics the doctors gave me. That’s quite problematic.

Why are we all of a sudden resistant to so many antibiotics and is this a real problem? Well yes, it is a real problem. For me being antiresistant to a UTI antibiotic isn’t the end of the world, but when it comes to more serious infections and people that are immunocompromised, it gets serious. According to CDC, antibiotic resistant infections caused more than 35,000 deaths last year, which maybe could have been prevented. Obviously it’s amazing that antibiotics were discovered in the first place, but they shouldn’t have lasted as short as they did. Antibiotics have been so overused that bacteria are developing mutations to certain medications, causing them to not actually work. People are using them for illness that don’t actually need, them, unnecessarily introducing them to our body which in turn, means they might not work later on.

So what’s going happen if we end up not being able to use ANY antibiotics? We die? It basically means that the medicine we use to cure our infections now are no longer going to kill any of the nasty germs in our body. It could make it so our illnesses are impossible to get rid of, so will we just be walking infections? Nope, we can only survive so long with infections overriding our body. People are already dying from so many diseases because of antibiotic resistance, mortality rates are just going to skyrocket when we become completely resistant. We’re going to be at square one, before antibiotics were even invented. With the resistance, there will be so many medical technique setbacks including “cancer treatment, organ transplants, and joint replacements.” So the conclusion is, stop overusing antibiotics!!!!