But the world is running out of antibiotics, according to a WHO report. Certainly I wouldn’t wouldn’t worry about it light of any possible impending pandemic.
“Antimicrobial resistance is a global health emergency that will seriously jeopardize progress in modern medicine,” says Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of WHO. “There is an urgent need for more investment in research and development for antibiotic-resistant infections including TB, otherwise we will be forced back to a time when people feared common infections and risked their lives from minor surgery.”
In addition to multidrug-resistant tuberculosis, WHO has identified 12 classes of priority pathogens – some of them causing common infections such as pneumonia or urinary tract infections – that are increasingly resistant to existing antibiotics and urgently in need of new treatments.
Tuberculosis, by the way, is spread via the air and affects your lungs. It used to be the leading cause of death in the 20th century. Then came antibiotics. What happens without them? And what happens without the antibiotics used to treat even more common infections like UTI’s? Well, with everything else going on, let’s hope we don’t find out.