Antibiotics are chemicals which kill bacteria or stop them growing. Many are made by other microbes as part of their own defences. Chemists have developed these for medical use and invented some others that do not occur naturally.
Their discovery nearly fifty years ago revolutionized the treatment of bacterial infections and greatly enhanced the reputation of medical science. It involved, however, the removal of a natural mechanism from its proper context and a big increase in the scale of its use.
This called for much responsibility and discretion, far more than was actually exercised. Consequently antibiotics are used far too often, mostly when bacteria are not even involved in the disease being treated.
Particularly unfortunate is their routine use in low doses to promote the growth of animals for food. You consume these antibiotics in their meat, but in doses too low to eradicate the bacteria in your colon or on your skin.
As a result many are now resistant to destruction by the simplest and safest antibiotics. These resistant varieties thrive at the expense of the non-resistant, altering the kinds of bacteria that live alongside us and perhaps contributing to new diseases like colitis and irritable bowel syndrome. They have reinstated some old fashioned diseases too, like gastro-enteritis, that antibiotics were supposed to have conquered.
Meanwhile habitual assistance from antibiotics is making us lazy. We pay too little attention to ordinary hygienic precautions, instead expecting antibiotic treatment as soon as we become ill. Because of this our defences are challenged insufficiently to establish adequate immunity to those bacteria we do encounter, so that we are still vulnerable next time we meet them. What is more, every course encourages the growth of fungal diseases like thrush.
All in all, we are behaving exactly as if we wanted antibiotics to become progressively less and less useful to us. Unless we change our habits drastically, during the next few decades we shall become increasingly reliant on antibiotics that will let us down more and more, giving us increasingly troublesome side effects all the time. We shall, in effect, be addicted to them — and on skid row.
What to do