Modern medicine relies on the use of antibiotics to prevent infection and they are essential when recovering from major surgery. Without antibiotics, many common medical procedures will become more dangerous. Invasive procedures, such as organ transplants and chemotherapy, will become lethal.
According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), a ‘post-antibiotic era’ is becoming a ‘growing epidemic’ costing the US $35 billion every year. 2 million cases of antibiotic resistance among patients were documented in the country during 2013.
The great majority of antibiotic demand is for use in agriculture. Of the approximately 150,000 metric tons of antibiotics made each year in the US, 80 percent are used on livestock. They are used to speed the animals development and to protect their commercial value. The danger is that resistance to antibiotics builds and spreads rapidly between humans, animals and crops. When humans consume livestock containing antibiotics, ingest crops grown using contaminated manure or come into contact with antibiotic-resistant humans, this resistance is easily passed on, and ultimately overpowers the antibiotic’s ability to heal.
In Brad Spellberg’s ‘The Rising Plague’, an analysis of the global threat of deadly bacteria, the world’s population is forecast to absorb 67 percent more antibiotics through meat consumption by 2030. A third of that increase is expected to come from changing livestock practices and shifting diets in emerging markets. As global incomes rise and urbanization expands, especially in the developing world, there is a simultaneous transition to more resource heavy, protein intensive diets. These burgeoning consumer classes across emerging markets are expected to see a 7.3% increase in per capita food consumption by 2050. Large-scale farms will inevitably attempt to meet the increasing demand as cheaply as possible.
One of the most concerning aspects of the post antibiotic era is that the number of new antibiotics in development has almost ground to a halt. Between 1928 and 1962, scientists had developed more than 20 new classes of antibiotics. Fast forward to 2013 and just five out of the 506 drugs in development in the US were antibiotics. Blame lies with the lack of incentive for pharmaceutical companies to develop new antibiotics, as short prescription cycles do not allow for the same profit margin opportunity as other longer and more intensive treatments for chronic diseases. If antibiotic use continues unabated, antibiotic-resistant infections are set to kill 10 million people worldwide every year by 2050.
Although an evolutionary inevitability, delaying the widespread development of antibiotic resistance by just 10 years would save $65 trillion of the world’s GDP between now and 2050.
On March 25, 2015, the Obama Administration announced its ‘National Action Plan for Combating Antibiotic-Resistance Bacteria.’ Under the five-year plan, the administration intends to reduce antibiotic use in outpatient settings by 50 percent and completely eliminate the use of medically important antibiotics for growth promotion in food producing animals.
We have still yet to see the full effects of our post antibiotic era. While governments can impose stricter legislation to curb the mis-use, consumers (and the companies that supply them, such as McDonalds and Costco) are also taking matters into their own hands by increasingly shifting to organically grown foods.