The reports of an imminent failure of important antibiotics due to developing resistance continues. Penny Sarchet surveys them in NewScientist (30 April 2016, no paywall), and a couple of points especially stood out. First,
Last year, 63,000 tonnes of antibiotics were fed to livestock to increase their size or protect them from infections. A 2006 ruling banning the use of antibiotics as growth promoters in Europe seems to have had little impact, says Mark Woolhouse at the University of Edinburgh, UK. We still don’t understand how dangerous such practices are to human health, but using antibiotics in industrial quantities should give bacteria ample chance to develop resistance. The gene that gave bacteria resistance to colistin probably evolved in a pig farm in China, for example.
The numbers are a bit astonishing, isn’t it? And then you have to wonder how a hypothetical world-wide trend towards vegetarianism would ripple through the business world. More ominous:
“I once said I was more concerned about antimicrobial resistance than I am about climate change, and I stand by that,” says Woolhouse. “I am worried that my family might be killed by antimicrobial resistance. I don’t have the same concern when it comes to climate change.”
In both cases it’ll depend on where you live, and to where you can move. And in the future, if nothing changes:
Yet while northern European countries, including the UK, have low levels of resistant strains, such infections kill more than 50,000 people across the continent and in the US every year. By 2050, annual deaths are expected to reach 317,000 in North America, and 390,000 in Europe, while the toll is expected to top 4 million in Asia and Africa.
