Good article. A further issue not identified here is that the ubiquity of antibacterial hand soap due to hygiene theatre is likely contributing to the creation of new superbugs.
Oh it's so much more than just antibacterial hand soap. Antibiotics should have been used sparingly but we give them out for just about anything. Doctors get reamed by their patients and get bad reviews if they don't give them out. Things like colds, which are 100% viral, get antibiotics from a huge number of doctors. We give antibiotics to livestock to fatten them up for more meat yield. We give antibiotics to plants to increase yield and to make sure they don't die. In large parts of the world, they're available over the counter. They're given as prophylactic treatment for dog/cat bites and scratches. We hand the pills out like candy, and because we're so casual about it, people don't fully understand and respect the bomb they're eating and as such, don't take the full course, which leads to only the strong surviving, but now having exposure to whatever was trying to kill it and building up immunity over time. We fucked up with antibiotics and are approaching a time when we will have few to no options available and are going to be in a post-antibiotic society, in which invasive surgery becomes a lot harder because if an infection happens, we can't just bomb you with antibiotics anymore because we won't have anything again. We kinda have phage therapy, but I mean: Source ^ the article I posted there Source for ^^ and ^ Wikipedia page for Phage Therapy It's far from perfect, and will need massive amounts of spending, a shitton of luck, and a lot of testing to find out what organisms are susceptible to what phages. A lot of people will die in the process. Phages will likely be a lot more expensive than antibiotics at least to start. You need to match a very specific, purified phage to a very specific bacteria, and who knows what mutations can happen that allow phage escape like the antibiotic escape we're seeing now. All in all, it's a shot in the dark that Western Medicine hasn't considered in decades and in fact one of the only places it's been seriously considered over the past few decades has been the Tbilisi Institute in Georgia and other parts of the Eastern World, including Russia, and with all the Cold War shit that went on for decades, Russia scary, we can't use their technology, so the Western World has shunned the technology and not invested for a long time. In 2019 the FDA finally approved the first clinical trial on phage therapy.Phages are notoriously finicky and ESKAPE infections are just as fussy. For this last-ditch therapy to work, bacteria eater would have to be precisely matched to superbug.
The high bacterial strain specificity of phage therapy may make it necessary for clinics to make different cocktails for treatment of the same infection or disease because the bacterial components of such diseases may differ from region to region or even person to person. In addition, this means that "banks" containing many different phages must be kept and regularly updated with new phages.
Further, bacteria can evolve different receptors either before or during treatment. This can prevent phages from completely eradicating bacteria.[10]