Delia McCrae

Delia McCrae is a retired Alberta teacher enjoying life on Canada’ s beautiful West Coast. When not gardening, singing with her choir, or spending time with grandchildren, she pursues writing and delves into timely topics like AMR.

Two centuries later, Louis Pasteur and a German cohort established a germ – disease relationship that led to the discovery of the organisms causing streptococcal diseases, tuberculosis, and rabies. The number of people dying from these infections spurred a quest for their cures.

Salvarsan was the first antimicrobial discovered in 1910, followed by Alexander Fleming’ s accidental discovery of penicillin in 1928. Beginning in the 1940s, the use of penicillin and antibiotics markedly reduced mortality from infectious diseases while also increasing the human lifespan.

Since then, antibiotics have supported medical advances in cancer treatment, heart surgery, and transplant surgery by reducing the risk of infection. The ability of antibiotics to combat many illnesses made them popular, and these inexpensive drugs became a huge money maker for drug companies.

Shortly after the Second World War, manufacturers began to add these“ wonder drugs” to consumer products, like cosmetics and disinfectants. They were prescribed for a wide range of maladies and used as prophylactics to prevent illness. Antibiotics were also introduced to animal husbandry, and farmers began to rely on antibiotics to keep animals healthy and to promote growth.

However, bacteria are living organisms and, therefore, evolve to survive.

Eventually, resistant strains of bacteria appeared, and drug companies developed a plethora of new antibiotics to keep up. This pattern of overuse in human health care and meat production created a perfect storm of antimicrobial resistance( AMR). Once-effective treatments became ineffective because of the strong quest of bacteria to survive and their ability to mutate against the constant background of antibiotics in their environments. Pharmaceutical companies also became more focused on developing medications for oncology, diabetes, Parkinson’ s disease, and other diseases than developing new antibiotic drugs.

Bacterial resistance and the emergence of“ superbugs”— bacteria that are resistant to more than one antibiotic— are now genuine global concerns. Ironically, Fleming himself cautioned against both the underdosing and overuse of penicillin when accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in 1945. Microbial resistance, it appears, has long been an issue and concern for the medical community.

It took decades, but researchers now acknowledge a connection between overuse of antibiotics in meat production and antimicrobial resistance( AMR) in humans. China, the world’ s largest pork producer and consumer, is a good example. There, about ten years ago, resistance to colistin, a last-resort

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