14 DAY TRIAL // Researchers with the Department of Economics at the University of Calgary, and the University of Toronto, both in Canada, warn that a global health crisis is imminent, unless efforts are taken to curb the massive amount of antibiotics being used for non-human applications around the world.
Paper author Aidan Hollis, from UC, and coauthor Ziana Ahmed, from UT, say that vast volumes of antibiotics are being used across the globe for applications that have nothing to do with human health.
A prime example of this is using these compounds for increasing food production. Antibiotics are currently fed to poultry, livestock, salmon, fruit trees, vegetables, and many other plants and animals, with the main goal of increasing food production.
However, while this goal may be noble and highly-useful, the indiscriminate use of antibiotics is giving birth to large numbers of resistant bacteria, which may cause a global health crisis soon, the team argues. Their new paper was published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM).
Hollis and Ahmed say that more than 80 percent of the antibiotics used in the United States go towards agriculture and aquaculture, not human use. While humans too contribute to the growing incidence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, the contaminated environment is the largest, most dangerous source.
Bacteria have the nasty habit of adapting to compounds meant to kill them. This happens if antibiotics do not manage to wipe out entire bacterial colonies first. In humans, preventing this from happening is as simple as following doctors' directions to the letter – something which patients rarely do in any case.
In the wild, however, the situation is more complicated. There are no boundaries present, like in the human body, so bacteria can escape antibiotics by simply spreading farther and farther away. As they do that, resistance to antibiotics has a higher chance of developing, Science Daily reports.
“Modern medicine relies on antibiotics to kill off bacterial infections. This is incredibly important. Without effective antibiotics, any surgery – even minor ones – will become extremely risky. Cancer therapies, similarly, are dependent on the availability of effective antimicrobials. Ordinary infections will kill otherwise healthy people,” Hollis explains.
“It's not just the food we eat. Bacteria is spread in the environment; it might wind up on a doorknob. You walk away with the bacteria on you and you share it with the next person you come into contact with. If you become infected with resistant bacteria, antibiotics won't provide any relief,” he adds.
If these types of microorganisms make their way into the Third World, where healthcare is lacking, or missing altogether, then a global health crisis will soon follow, the team concludes.