A while back I wrote about how bugs are going to bring the apocalypse; this week is about how germs are going to kill us.
Newton once talked about how every action has a reaction. This law of physics, while meant for the realm of science, is applicable to our daily lives. Have you ever considered that when you don’t take your medicine you’re not hurting yourself but everyone else? Once, long ago, the discovery of penicillin was one of mankind’s biggest accomplishments as bacteria could finally be killed, and we began our journey of trying to eradicate that which we never had a weapon against. Soon, however, they started to come back stronger. Why? People weren’t finishing their antibiotic treatments to term. This resulted with bacteria population that, as they didn’t die, became resistant to penicillin. Much like what Nietzsche said, “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” and bacteria are living proof of this. What happens is people take antibiotics but are inconsistent with keeping up with it or just simply stop when they feel better. Just because a person feels better doesn’t mean that they’ve been cured. This leaves a breeding ground for the bacteria that survived to reproduce and get stronger.
This is where the term “super bugs” come in which is a bacteria that has become resistant to antibiotics. Our dominion on bacteria was short-lived as the medicine we had before is becoming rapidly obsolete against their quick evolution. Now we struggle to make new antibiotics that slowly, and ironically, become more toxic to us because we can’t keep up with the development of bacterium. With all of these issues, there are more and more deaths due to antibiotic resistant bacteria which cannot be treated. If this continues, more and more people will get infected with these super bacteria and even more people will die. There may be that apocalyptic date where a bacteria pops up that we can’t treat that has the ability to bring us to the point of extinction, while all we had to do was listen to our doctor and take our medicine.
Our planet is dealing with some serious issues when it comes to bugs and germs. With both bees dying and bacteria getting stronger, our world is headed in a bad direction. However this is all avoidable by taking an active effort to fix these two important issues that plague us. If we don’t wake up soon, within the next couple generations we could find our world looking like a scene straight out of a "Mad Max"movie.
