Antibiotics are amazing; arguably the second most amazing discovery behind electricity. I have heard cogent and persuasive arguments that antibiotics are the defining feature of modern medicine being modern, meaning that you have a better chance of a doctor helping you instead of making you worse.
Unfortunately when using technological advances, humanity has repeatedly decided that if a little of something is good, a ton of it is great. Hence antibiotic use is now prevalent just about everywhere for use as a cure all. In the past I have talked about how simple changes to medical protocol would save hundreds of thousands of lives and billions of dollars a year. Reading back, what I did not mention explicitly is that a major reason for the laziness is due to the rise of antibiotics. It became standard protocol to use them as much as possible — give it to the patient, put it on your hands, run it through the IV, etc. — and worked for a long time, so doctors and nurses stopped following sanitation protocols because they could with minimal failures. However, evolution is the most powerful force on the planet and we are now reaping the full bore of those decisions.
While the last few decades has seen the immense rise of MRSA in hospitals, most of those infections could be stopped if caught in time with a small group of super antibiotics that are kept under lock and key as a last resort. Now a new mutation has arisen, creating bacteria that nothing can kill at the moment or for the foreseeable future and could potentially be transmitted to all sorts of common strains.
It is far too early to tell how much of a problem this will be because infectious disease must be evaluated on metrics of transmission and virulence in addition to treatabliity. Diseases that are highly virulent and nearly untreatable (like Ebola) can have a far lesser impact than highly transmittable diseases with moderately low virulence and moderate treatability (like seasonal flu). On the other hand, hospital infections have proven to be very transmittable and fairly virulent, so this could potentially turn into a major epidemic and finally force widescale changes to medical practices.
Regardless of the outcome of this particular mutation, it is the strongest warning sign yet that we need to step back and evaluate our policies when it comes to using technology that affects biological ecosystems (on all scales) because the negative effects are bound to get worse and worse. It’s not just about human health either, for the overuse of herbicides is causing “superweeds” and increasing numbers of harmful insects are becoming pesticide resistant. I’m definitely in the camp that evolutionary selection will be able to thwart us long after we’ve run out of good ideas on how to improve the *cides.
On the flip side, if we choose to embrace systems oriented policies that respect the rules of evolution and ecosystems, we can reverse the trend and greatly lower the toxicity of our chemical/drug interventions as well as save hundreds of billions of dollars in R&D and expensive failures.
Let us hope that our collective wisdom will rise before our indiscretions cause the deaths of millions more.