By The Beacon Editorial Board
Nobody likes getting sick. The coughing, sneezing and general feelings of unease and discomfort that accompany sickness are not what people generally like to experience.
Sickness though, is usually transitory, and if the symptoms persist you can typically count on there being some medicine that can cure or alleviate your symptoms. As Americans, it is widely believed that the best medical care in the world is our birthright, and that medical science can overcome any ailment.
But what if you don't get better? What if the doctors, with all of their knowledge and science, look you in the eye and tell you that your chances of recovery are slim to none, that to give you any hope they will have to amputate a limb. What if the reason that you are so incurably sick is because people abuse antibiotics? (Or worse, that cows abuse antibiotics?)
Even here in the UP bubble, we aren't isolated from the occasional rogue bacteria. Howard Hall's recent closure due to fears of antibiotic-resistant strains of staph is a poignent reminder of how, despite all precautions and medical advances, we can still fall victim to some of the oldest organisms on earth.
But let's not get ahead of ourselves. This is America. If people are sick and need medication, they should be allowed to take it. But how do we define this "need" to take medication?
Streptococcal pharyingitis (strep throat) certainly warrants the use of antibiotics. So does highly-contagious conjunctivitis (pink eye). But taking antibiotics to combat the common cold?
Yes, it's uncomfortable to sneeze and sniffle and cough through your classes for a week. But it's endurable.
Taking unnecessary antibiotics strengthens bacteria, making illnesses caused by bacteria harder to fight. This is how superbugs are formed.
Because bacteria have a much more rapid life cycle than we do, they can form imunities to different antibiotic drugs over thousands of generations of evolution. While this is a powerful survival mechanism for the bacteria, it has a terrible potential for human life. Given enough time, and enough misuse of antibiotic treatments, we could eventually cause epidemics of super resistent bacteria (superbugs) to evolve.
A superbug is a strain of bacteria that has become immune to the antibiotics that are usually used to fight it. MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) is one such bacterium.
Superbugs are problems for obvious reasons: if the bacteria has become resistant to the very antibiotic that we use to fight it, how can we treat the illness?
Even if we stop taking antibiotics for petty illnesses, we still have a problem. Hundreds of thousands of feedlot cattle are raised with the help of antibiotics. They are intentionally fed growth hormones so that they will grow bigger in a shorter amount of time.
However, This process weakens the cow's natural immunities and neccessitates giving them massive amounts of antibiotics to keep them healthy enough to go to slaughter.
The more antibiotics that are used - on people or otherwise - the stronger the bacteria get and the more often our run-of-the-mill penicillins won't be able to do the job.
It's almost like we're immunizing the very bacteria that is making us sick.
