Antibiotics and Superbugs

(image from the CDC )

In an article for the monthly review, Ian Angus goes into great detail antibiotic resistance bacteria. These microbes are and will continue to be a plague on our species (much like the capitalist class). Their proliferation, continued resistance to antibiotics, and severe existential threat to homo sapiens are directly the result of avarice by Big Pharma.

To summarize the article in a sentence,

“If pharmaceutical companies had deliberately set out to encourage antibiotic resistance, they would have made every effort to ensure that the drugs were disseminated as fast and irrationally as possible—which is exactly what happened.”

The ability of bacteria to adapt to antibiotics is not never. It has been going on for some billion years. It's the reckless use of antibiotics, thrown carelessly onto populations in the sole pursuit of making a sale and $$$ that has caused microbes to become increasingly resistant to humanity's basic defenses.

Modern medicine was found on the basis of antibiotics. Mainly, that we can use them to prevent infections. Surgeries considered normal (albeit severe), from c-sections to chemotherapy, would become unthinkably dangerous if antibiotics are no longer a viable option of defense.

After WW2, big Pharma, in an effort to turn a profit off antibiotics, recklessly produced their own variants of the pills and marketed them from everything to headache cures to nosebleeds. They were put in tooth paste and lipstick. From there, Big Pharma has gone around the world, particularly in the developing world, and sold their pills. The overabundance and consumption of antibiotics is pervasive to such an unnecessary degree that pills considered viable only as a last option are instead taken regularly, for things with no medical basis (e.g. antibiotics for a cold).

As climate change continues to disrupt and destroy our ecosystems, and as humanity continues its pursuit of profit and growth and consumption under capitalist social relations, more super bugs will continue to plague our society. Already, some 33000 people die each year as a direct consequence of an infection due to bacteria resistant to antibiotics and that the burden of these infections is comparable to that of influenza, tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS combined. (source)

This isn't even touching the absurd amounts of antibiotics necessary to pump into animals and livestock to keep them alive in slaughterhouses, conditions that are abhorrent and nightmarish by any sane standard.

So when the plagues come and our medicines no longer have any effect, be sure to remember all those idiots taking tetracycline because they had a bit of a cold.