Are we heading for a world without antibiotics?
November 18th is European Antibiotic Awareness Day . Why yet another "Day of this or that"? Because we are in serious trouble, With growing antibiotic resistance and no new antibiotic groups in the pipeline, many infections previously easily treated with antibiotics are now proving increasingly difficult and often impossible to overcome. Before the advent of antibiotics in the 1940s, people used to die commonly and in large numbers from pneumonia, meningitis, TB, septicaemia and other everyday infections which, until recently, were curable with antibiotics. However, we are now seeing increasing death-rates from these infections due to drug resistance. Each year in the United States, at least 2 million people become infected with bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics and at least 23,000 people die each year as a direct result of these infections. Many more people die from other conditions that were complicated by an antibiotic-resistant infection. The World Heal