“The UN says up to 10 million people a year could die from resistant infections as common medicines continue to become ineffective.”
“With more and more common medications losing their ability to fight dangerous infections, and few new drugs in the pipeline, the UN has warned the world is facing an imminent crisis that could lead to millions of deaths, a surge in global poverty and an even wider gap between rich and poor countries.
Drug-resistant infections already claim 700,000 lives a year, including 230,000 deaths from drug-resistant tuberculosis, the UN report said.”
Read more here:
UN issues urgent warning on growing drug-resistant infections
This is the result of the overuse of antibiotics.
The increase in antibiotic resistant bacteria has been noted for the last couple of decades. Many in the scientific and medical communities know this is coming. A return to pre-antibiotic, pre-1940s death rates. The leading cause of death in the United States and every nation before 1940 (before penicillin) was from infections.
This is from much more than the drastic overuse of antibiotics in your typical parents bringing in a sniffly nosed kid and demanding antibiotics for what is clearly a minor virus infection. The main culprit in the overuse of antibiotics is beef and dairy farming. Along with the piles of other junk that get chucked into the food bins for the cows, the pigs, and the chickens, is literally tons of antibiotics. They are added to fend off infections in the poor living conditions of most food animals. Similarly “farm-raised” fish get many tons of antibiotics dumped into their cesspools that they swim in.
I’m not sure of the physiology, but food animals are also said to grow larger as well with antibiotics; which of course means more money per animal at slaughter.
Unfortunately, we are what we eat, and so while the fish and the pigs and the cows and the chickens develop colonies of bacteria, that are resistant to the antibiotics, we then eat them and gain the same population of bacteria.
Now the drugs which should be limited to only treating human infections are everywhere throughout the human population everywhere across the planet.
Evolution in action, and we are the stressors on the bacterial populations.
The solution is two-fold.
One: stop all animal animal product consumption, and
Two: stop using antibiotics for anything other than human bacterial infections, (along with keeping a few antibiotics reserved for a decade or two, so that they can be switched back and forth with the ones that are fading in their effectiveness).
Good luck convincing the populace that this needs to be done.
