Antibiotic Resistance: One of the Largest Threats We Face

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blood. An individual, in most cases, is able to take precautions to ensure they do not contract the disease. For cancer and heart disease, action can also be taken to prevent the disease. Medical checkups can ensure the problems are spotted early and effective action taken. In short, these diseases are manageable. Bacterial diseases do not have this same manageability. A person can contract them from someone else and the disease can quickly spread. Consider how chicken pox or measles spreads through a school community. If these same diseases spreading were critical ones, such as tuberculosis, and there was no treatment available, the result is a plague. While this may be taking the issue to the extreme, this is the reality of the potential of the antibiotic resistance problem.
The potential real problems associated with antibiotic resistance can be seen by several diseases that are increasingly becoming a problem. Some of the bacterial diseases that are increasingly ...

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a bacteria that infects burns and surgical wounds. This bacteria has been described as "endemic in hospitals" (NIAID).
The problem with Staphylococcus aureus also shows the worst case scenario of antibiotic-resitant bacteria:

"Since 1996, at least four patients--three in the United States and one in Japan--reportedly were infected with a strain that was partially resistant to normal doses of the powerful, last-resort antibiotic vancomycin. Some strains of S. aureus have already shown resistance to all antibiotics other than vancomycin, raising the fear that an invincible strain is near at hand" (Lewis).

This is the worst case scenario and the biggest risk. Vancomycin is the ...

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