The horror show with antibiotic resistance

Nowadays antibiotics are the crucial medicines among all the drugs. All are oversmart enough to consume Azithromycin when sore throat or AmoxyClav when wound with pus or Clindamycin ointment for acne. But they don't know what these mighty molecules are going to be done with the future. All the infections may not require higher antibiotics. Sometimes infection may be due to virus. Here antibiotics are useless or I would say harmful. Antibiotic resistance will be a new disaster before global warming if we don't care.

Can you imagine the scenario when your children will be suffering from fever and the medications will not be working for them? Can you imagine the situation of ICUs where all the heroic antibiotics may lose their ability? Can you imagine the era when a surgery will be near to impossible? Yes, we are entering into the era of superbugs.

Superbugs will be the new challenge of mankind to survive. As Charles Darvin said everybody has right to survive and these bacteria find their way to survive. They adapt to fight against the antibiotics and the same fight skills are grown to the upcoming bacteria by DNA alterations. Thus Superbugs accelerate their community. The next generation bacteria will be more mighty and more adaptable to our known antibiotics. They can ruin your preplanned treatment in just a minute. So it's not necessary that the resistance developed in your own body only matters for you. You may be directly infected by resistant bacteria from the other vectors just like passive infection. Does it sound like horror? Wait, still a long way to go.

Have you ever noticed the average hospital stay of a patient? It's almost increasing day by day and we can proudly(oh, really!?) say that the bed occupancy rate in 2050 will be more than 100%. Just imagine you have a token in your palm and waiting for a bed in hospital just because your illness is not cured by antibiotics normally. The doctor will ask you for five days of indoor treatment and stay just for a simple wound and you'll look at your wallet whether it would bear it at all or not.

We are so much reliable on antibiotics that we can't imagine a single treatment or surgery without them. Your liver is not functioning well and you need to replace it and you get a donor suddenly, that's great. But wait you are resistant to most of the antibiotics so the doctor will refuse to transplant your liver. Your surgery will be easy but to stabilize your conditions doctor won't trust the available antibiotics for you. There will be new consent form available for the patients for the post surgery infections.

Almost all the preterm delivered babies need some special care. Sepsis due to antibiotic resistance has become the 30% cause of newborn deaths in preterm deliveries. Can you imagine the power of superbugs who don't take pity on even new live arrivals? All the complicated deliveries also need to prevent infection in the current complications but the superbugs are the villains who don't cooperate to cure the maternal consequences.

We have most powerful technology to pump the heart artificially. We can transplant our limbs. We can also control the blood pressure and diabetes by simple medications and diet plans. But all of these will never be easy without antibiotics. We are helpless against superbugs. Indian government has just launched Bedaquilline (a new but very costly bactericidal anti TB drug) free of cost for the extremely drug resistant TB patients. Especially for the developing countries like India, the cost of the treatment will definitely affect the economy a little bit. That's why before 2050 antibiotic resistance will engulf such countries first before the strike of global warming or terrorism. Still we are on the way from where we can look behind to step back. After all it's our future.

Read: How can we fight against antibiotic resistance?

Final Funda: Once in a dream I found the gauntlet of Thanos and tried to pinch for a while but it didn't work. Suddenly a superbug came infront of me and said "Sorry, it's infected."