Without antibiotic all invasive practical procedures, operations, plastic surgery, transplant surgery, hip or knee replacement, open heart surgery, bypass and minor surgical procedures will soon come to a grinding halt. The very technology we’ve created to help us live more comfortable and, yes, often healthier lives will turn around and bite us-hard. This proves just how vulnerable we are despite all our scientific know-how and advances in medicine.Our politicians are advised by members of medical community based on research conducted in the past and call them "Evidence Based Medicine". The solutions they promote and monitor is "Good Hand Washing Technique". Millions of $ are spent on promotions that may infact be detrimental to our effort. Recently scientist published a disturbing paper; they discovered antibiotic-resistant bacteria growing in ocean, water, sewer and alcohol. All these resulted due to aggressive chemicals used to clean our hospitals, indiscriminate use of antiseptic lotions and dumping of antibiotic in the sea to read salmon.
Ethanol (Alcohol) producer used Penicillin to eliminate the growth of bacteria during fermentations for half a century. Now they are using higher dose to increase better ethanol yield. These bacteria are not simple; they are smarter, faster and are armed with eight enzymes that kill us in minutes. They have the knowledge, power and have the technology to manupulate their genes rapidly and help defend them. Good bacteria are picking up debris, genes and plasmid from the dead resistant bacteria and are arming themselves to defend. Resistant bacteria are also capable of swapping genes with harmless bacteria making them lethal killers.
We may take more than twenty years understand how they can restructure their genes in twenty minutes. Using alcohol wipes to clean wound, washing hands or preparing skin before injections and operations may now do more harm than good. Healthy hands will soon become colonised with only resistant bacteria, and there is no way we can stop this proliferation and spread.
We must force authorities and politicians to step out from this protected environment, use their common sense and aggressively introducing changes in policy and practice to stop antibiotic abuse and reduce dumping contaminated hospital waste. It will be too late, if we continue this practice to relay upon scientific data, proved hypothesis and knowledge we accumulated in the last twenty years (post-antibiotic era).
This may not be in the interest of multinationals and major pharmaceuticals, medical device and equipment manufacturers but will certainly help us all survive a major assault from the tiniest invaders in this planet. "A War We Will Never Win"
