Did you know that antibiotics can’t treat any disease?
While it might sound like a silly question, a lot of people misuse antibiotics to treat colds or flus. Thus, they do more harm than good. Antibiotics only have the power to fight bacterial infections, not viral ones, like colds and flus.
The severe misuse and overuse of antibiotics often leads to antibiotic resistance, one of the most important threats to public health. The bacteria become resistant to the medicine design to kill it, it learns to survive and spread, leading to serious illnesses such as tuberculosis or lung infections which can no longer be treated.
According to World Health Organization, 25,000 deaths occurred in the European Region are caused by an infection with a resistant bacterial strain.
What do we do when antibiotics no longer work?
Resistant bacteria can easily spread to other people, and the infections caused by it can worsen, to the point where the treatment options are extremely limited, the treatment time is longer, the side effects are more severe, and the medical needs are significantly more expensive.
Maryn McKenna talked at TED about the post-antibiotic world, where drug-resistand bacteria threatens the life of people with the simplest of infections.
Listen to the full talk below: