The End of Antibiotics May Be Near

It's called MRSA (methicillin resistant staphylococcus aureus) or "flesh-eating bacteria." It's so named because it's the new super bug that causes necrosis of the flesh. Some people have been disfigured by it and some have died.

The reason that this form of staph infection is so nasty is that it has mutated so it is resistant to almost all of the antibiotics that we have to fight it, and some strains are even becoming resistant to the one that we still have that works.

If these super bugs keep mutating then we could be in the battle of our lives against infectious disease in the near future. Several hundred-years-ago, we didn't live very long, 45 was about it. The two big killers of men at the time were war and infectious disease.

Many children died right after birth because we had no defense against these diseases. Then penicillin was discovered and other more potent antibiotics followed. For a time, we thought that we could wipe out most infectious disease around the world. Chronic diseases like heart disease and diabetes took all of our attention.

The big pharmaceutical companies became lax. Developing new classes of antibiotics became too expensive. And why bother. We thought that we already had all of the antibiotics that we needed. People began asking for antibiotics even when they didn't need them. And they took them wrong. Instead of finishing all of the medication like it said on the bottle, they took the antibiotics until they started feeling better and then stopped.

What this did is cause the leftover bugs in their system that they didn't kill by stopping the medication to develop a resistance to that antibiotic in the future. Pretty soon more and more antibiotics began losing their effectiveness. According to Medical News Today:

"In recent years there has been a lot of news about the impending antibiotics crisis, brought to a head by renewed awareness that we are running out of drugs to treat evolving super bugs,"

Some scientists say that this is the end to antibiotics. Are we to return to a pre-penicillin era where a simple common infection can lead to death? There are some new promising treatments that could be on the horizon. We could genetically engineer bacteria that will infect and kill the invading bacteria. But then we still have viruses to deal with, but antibiotics never did anything against them anyway.

Right now we have one antibiotic that will still treat the super bugs, but how long will it be effective? We can only hope that we develop new treatments before it no longer works.

Source: http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/213193.php