Are we in a post antibiotic era?

If there’s a point where antibiotics are no longer effective, one expert says we’re “already there.”

Immediately after penicillin became widely used some 80 years ago, bacteria started figuring out how to evade antibiotic medications. Ever since, the arms race between dangerous microbes and humans has raged. A new study shows that in crucial ways, humans keep losing.

“We have talked in the past about going into a post-antibiotic era, where we no longer have antibiotics, but in many respects we’re already there,” says Rick Martinello, an infectious diseases physician at Yale Medicine and medical director of its infection prevention program. “Without the benefit of antibiotics, the outcomes for that individual are bleaker… deaths, prolonged infection, longer hospital stays.

They found people with chronic diseases or more acute illnesses were more likely to acquire a resistant infection. Plus, “The implication is we did it to people,” Yek says. Germs can enter a patient’s body through hospital interventions, including catheters, intravenous lines, and/or surgical openings.

In these situations, “the patients get the Hail Mary of multiple antibiotics in hopes there will be synergy…but on the whole, those patients don’t get cured of their infections and a lot of them probably die from their infections,” says Yak, whose specialty is infectious diseases.

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