Hello Captain Trips: The risk is real: ‘We have already run out of antibiotics’ according to experts

[Katashi_itto]

Humans face the very real risk of a future without antibiotics, a world of plummeting life expectancy where people die from diseases easily treatable today, scientists say.

Experts tracking the rise of drug resistance say years of health gains could be rolled back by mutating microbes that make illnesses more difficult and expensive to cure and carry a higher risk of death.

Some say the threat to wellbeing is on the scale of global warming or terrorism — yet resistance is being allowed to spread through an entirely preventable means — improper use of antibiotics.


“It is a major public health problem,” Patrice Courvalin, who heads the Antibacterial Agents Unit of France’s Pasteur Institute, told AFP.

“It is about more than not being able to treat a disease. It will erase much progress made in the last 20-30 years.”

Without antibiotics to tackle opportunistic bacteria that pose a particular risk for people who are very ill, major surgery, organ transplants or cancer and leukaemia treatment may become impossible, he explained.
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/01/19/the-risk-is-real-we-have-already-run-out-of-antibiotics-according-to-experts/