This is 50 percent of the misuse that is leading to resistance.' 'Once they have antibiotics in their hands, they act like they're aspirin. 'Patients come in and just demand antibiotics and say, `If I don't get them, I'll just go elsewhere.' And there will be a doctor who will prescribe it,' Levy said. Many people, at the slightest sign of a cold, demand the drugs - never mind that colds are caused by viruses and antibiotics are useless. Indiscriminate use of antibiotics also is to blame, and the main culprit is the average person with sniffles. The pharmaceutical industry listened to Stewart and turned its attention to more profitable drugs.īut not all the blame for the growing resistance can be ascribed to the drug companies.

Making matters worse, no new antibiotics are expected on the market by the end of the century. 'People say, `Oh, it's a rare event.' But now we know that the rare event is happening again and again.' Levy of Tufts University and the author of 'The Antibiotic Paradox: How Miracle Drugs are Destroying the Miracle.' 'It's a major crisis because people are dying, and people are going to die in the future,' said Dr. The potential nightmare is an Andromeda strain, a supermicrobe immune to all antibiotics that could wreak havoc. And because bacteria can transfer genes among themselves, experts only expect the resistance to grow. But in the past decade, a broad resistance to antibiotics has begun to emerge. In 1979, Surgeon General William Stewart declared that it was time to 'close the books on infectious diseases' and concentrate on killers such asĬancer. Pneumonia and tuberculosis, almost certain killers, were vanquished. Bacteria that invaded the body through nasty cuts and infected the blood no longer killed. Penicillin and other antibiotics, natural substances found in mold and in soil, saved millions of lives. Since 1942, when the government dispatched a relatively new drug called penicillin to save the burn victims of a nightclub fire in Boston, the world largely has been safe from killer bacteria. Happen.' 'We've had other close calls,' he said, 'and they are getting closer and closer.' 'This is just the harbinger of things to come,' said Rahal, head of the infectious disease center at the New York Hospital Medical Center of Queens.

But her story is really only a subplot of a much larger and frightening tale: the beginning of the end of the antibiotic miracle. The FDA consented and doctors gave the middle-aged woman pris-tin-a-my-cin, a French drug. Jim Rahal went to the Food and Drug Administration with a plea: He needed the agency's permission to try an antibiotic that had never been used or even tested in the United States. Not a single antibiotic in the nation's arsenal, not even the big gun, vancomycin, could destroy the bacteria ravaging her.So Dr. She had undergone extensive surgery for blocked arteries and had developed an inexorable infection in a blood vessel deep in her abdomen.

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