Is The Age Of Antibiotics Over?

Uh-oh. Is the age of antibiotics over?

Above, you’re looking at a picture of strep throat. We’ve long known that bacteria could mutate, making them resistant to antibiotics. Now it seems a new gene in is developing in certain kinds of bacteria, making them hyper-resistant—invincible, in fact—against every kind of antibiotic we know how to make.

“Now,” reports a terrifying article in the Guardian today, “the post-antibiotic apocalypse is within sight.”

Apparently the source of the problem is a gene in bacteria called NDM-1, which developed in India and has travelled to England by way of “medical tourism”—the term itself is enough to make one shudder.

Here’s the basic gist, according to Tim Walsh and his colleagues at the journal Lancet Infectious Diseases: “In many ways, this is it. This is potentially the end. There are no antibiotics in the pipeline that have activity against NDM 1. We have a bleak window of maybe 10 years where we are going to have to use the antibiotics we have very wisely, but also grapple with the reality that we have nothing to treat these infections with.”

The result, if Walsh and others in the medical community are right, will be turning back of the the clock to a time before antibiotics. This will mean things like Tuberculosis will again become incurable, according to the Guardian, and routine operations like having one’s appendix removed will become highly dangerous.

And of course, unless we come up with abundant new forms antibiotic treatments to out-Darwin the bacteria, the remaining antibiotic supplies that actually have some effect will be ever-rarer resources, likely causing nasty fights over the available goods.

If this is the case, we may have one good decade left—economy be damned. Prince once implored us to party like it was 1999. None of us really obeyed (well, maybe some of us did), but this time around his advice really may be just what the doctor ordered: smoke if you got ‘em. Tonight I’m gonna party like it’s 2019.