Antibiotics save thousands of lives each year and have become essential to our existence. They fight bacterial infections so effectively that, until recently, I was not aware that a person could die of something like strep throat. However, despite their usefulness, they are vastly overused, and restrictions on them are needed to avoid potential disaster.
Bacteria have the ability to mutate faster than we can develop new antibiotics to fight them off. Our knowledge of the selective pressures against the bacteria –stay alive and reproduce against whatever the latest antibiotic does to stop them- is all that allows us to predict how they might mutate in the future and develop an antibiotic to fight them. The bacteria are becoming steadily more resilient, and new antibiotics are being developed to combat them, stronger than before. However, this cannot continue indefinitely. The danger of bacteria becoming so resilient that we cannot find any way to combat them is very real and will only increase if there is no control soon.
Antibiotics are laced into the foods given to farm animals, which do keep disease and infection at bay, providing more revenue for the farmers as less of their animals die or get sick. However, by doing this we are refusing to let natural selection take place in the animal populations. With the antibiotics added to their food, there is almost no chance that the naturally weak will be weeded out by sickness as they would in the wild. This leaves the population with weak members that it wouldn’t have otherwise. Along with this, there is also the fact that we are breeding weaker animals by not giving them a chance to fight infections themselves, which, added to the weak animals that survive because of the antibiotics, gives whole populations of farm animals weak immune systems, unfit to combat a bacterial outbreak not foreseen by the makers of the antibiotics.
Antibiotics are necessary to stop potentially deadly bacterial infections such as strep throat. However, in taking them and killing the bacteria that are making us sick, we are also killing the good bacteria that keep us healthy. We need these good bacteria to survive, and taking antibiotics for every small thing takes a huge toll on our health. Restrictions would be beneficial to the good bacteria and therefore us, taking antibiotics only when we absolutely need them.
Despite the need for antibiotics to prevent death from infections we now see as commonplace and don’t even consider threatening anymore, their use should be restricted. With the mutating ability of bacteria, the potential for a bacterial epidemic that we cannot find a cure for is a large threat which grows the longer there is slack control over dispersion of antibiotics. Our farm animals are being breed weaker by the constant addition of antibiotics to their food. We often neglect to realize that antibiotics also kill the good bacteria that we need to stay alive and healthy. Antibiotics are an amazing discovery, but in order for them to continue to be effective in the future, their use should be restricted.
