What Does a Post-Antibiotic Era Look Like? | Civil Eats

What Does a Post-Antibiotic Era Look Like?

Antibiotics are becoming dangerously impotent, resulting in two million infections and 23,000 deaths each year, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). But what happens when we lose these drugs altogether? Reporter Maryn McKenna explores the dramatic implications of that question for the Food & Environment Reporting Network (FERN) in its first collaboration with Medium.com in a piece out today called “Imagining the Post-antibiotics Future.”

“Before antibiotics, five women died out of every 1,000 who gave birth. One out of nine people who got a skin infection died, even from something as simple as a scrape or an insect bite. Three out of ten people who contracted pneumonia died from it,” writes McKenna. “Ear infections caused deafness; sore throats resulted in heart failure.”

In the story, McKenna explores the story of her great uncle who died in 1938 of an infection following a scrape he received while working as a firefighter. If this had occurred only five years later, he could have been cured in a matter of hours with penicillin. Instead, the 30-year-old newlywed died.

Unfortunately, cases like this might once again become more common. “If we’re not careful, we will soon be in a post-antibiotic era,” Dr. Thomas Frieden, the director of the CDC, told McKenna. “For some patients and some microbes, we are already there.”

Many hospitals are already taking precautions, flagging patients who arrive with infections. But as bacteria become more resistant and infections more dangerous, the healthcare industry will be less willing to take risks. Many procedures that are now routine–organ transplants, cancer treatment, hip replacements, treatment for rheumatoid arthritis, surgery and intensive care medicine–would become untenable without antibiotics.

McKenna also explores the livestock industry, which currently accounts for 80 percent of all antibiotic use. “A growing body of scientific research links antibiotic use in animals to the emergence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria: in the animals’ own guts, in the manure that farmers use on crops or store on their land, and in human illnesses as well,” reports McKenna. “Resistant bacteria move from animals to humans in groundwater and dust, on flies, and in the meat those animals get turned into.”

A 2011 FDA report published last February found that 65 percent of chicken breasts and 44 percent of ground beef carried bacteria resistant to tetracycline, and 11 percent of pork chops carried bacteria resistant to five classes of drugs.

newsmatch 2023 banner - donate to support civil eats

“Yet a post-antibiotic era imperils agriculture as much as it does medicine,” reveals McKenna. “If antibiotics became useless, then animals would suffer: Individual illnesses could not be treated, and if the crowded conditions in which most meat animals are raised were not changed, more diseases would spread.”

While the U.S. moves toward a future without antibiotics, government edicts in Denmark, Norway, and the Netherlands to lower antibiotic use in healthcare and agriculture have resulted in a slowing of resistant infections.

While McKenna points to a number of solutions available in the U.S., she points out that all the measures tried thus far have proven insignificant. For dramatic results, “the prospect of a post-antibiotic era has to be taken seriously, and those staring down the trend say that still seems unlikely,” she writes.

You can read the story here at Medium.com, or here on FERN’s Web site, which includes an exclusive infographic.

We’ll bring the news to you.

Get the weekly Civil Eats newsletter, delivered to your inbox.

Paula Crossfield is a founder and the Editor-at-large of Civil Eats. She is also a co-founder of the Food & Environment Reporting Network. Her reporting has been featured in The Nation, Gastronomica, Index Magazine, The New York Times and more, and she has been a contributing producer at The Leonard Lopate Show on New York Public Radio. An avid cook and gardener, she currently lives in Oakland. Read more >

Like the story?
Join the conversation.

    More from

    Antibiotics

    Featured

    Injured divers work on various exercises in a small rehabilitation room at the hospital. Dr. Henzel Roberto Pérez, the deputy director of information management at the hospital, said that one of the many problems with the lobster diving industry is “Children are working for these companies. At least one of the companies is from the United States.” (Photo credit: Jacky Muniello)

    Diving—and Dying—for Red Gold: The Human Cost of Honduran Lobster

    The Walton Family Foundation invested in a Honduran lobster fishery, targeting its sustainability and touting its success. Ten years later, thousands of workers have been injured or killed. 

    Popular

    This Indigenous Cook Wants to Help Readers Decolonize Their Diets

    author Sara Calvosa Olson and the cover of her book about indigenous foods and foodways, Chimi Nu'am. (Photo courtesy of Sara Calvosa Olson)

    This #GivingTuesday, Help Us Celebrate Our Successes

    prize winning squash for giving tuesday!

    Can Virtual Fences Help More Ranchers Adopt Regenerative Grazing Practices?

    A goat grazing with one of them virtual fencing collars on its neck. (Photo credit: Lisa Held)

    With Season 2, ‘High on the Hog’ Deepens the Story of the Nation’s Black Food Traditions

    Stephen Satterfield and Jessica B. Harris watching the sunset at the beach, in a still from Netflix's High on the Hog Season 2. (Photo courtesy of Netflix)