FTA: Dame Sally said: "If we don't take action, then we may all be back in an almost 19th Century environment where infections kill us as a result of routine operations. We won't be able to do a lot of our cancer treatments or organ transplants."
I'm surprised how rarely phages are mentioned when it comes to antibiotic resistance. There are alternatives to antibiotics. From Wikipedia: Medical trials were carried out, but a basic lack of understanding of phages made these invalid. Phage therapy was seen as untrustworthy, because many of the trials were conducted on totally unrelated diseases such as allergies and viral infections. Antibiotics were discovered and marketed widely. They were easier to make, store and to prescribe. Former Soviet research continued, but publications were mainly in Russian or Georgian languages, and were unavailable internationally for many years. Clinical trials evaluating the antibacterial efficacy of bacteriophage preparations were conducted without proper controls and were methodologically incomplete preventing the formulation of important conclusions.Phages were discovered to be antibacterial agents and were used in the United States and Europe during the 1920s and 1930s for treating bacterial infections. They had widespread use, including treatment of soldiers in the Red Army. However, they were abandoned for general use in the West for several reasons:
Phages probably suffer from the same disease antibiotics do these days, "capitalism-unfriendliness":"It's quite simple - if they make something to treat high blood pressure or diabetes and it works, we will use it on our patients everyday.
"Whereas antibiotics will only be used for a week or two when they're needed, and then they have a limited life span because of resistance developing anyway."
And sadly, the prescribing doctors are mostly to blame. Instead of gradually upping anti-biotics from the oldest to the newest, they've been carelessly just prescribing the newest first for quite awhile now. I have to ask my doctors for amoxicillin because it still works when I get strep or ear infections. But last time I mentioned this to the doctor she just said "I'm the doctor" and gave my cipromax or whatever it's called now... It pisses me off a wee bit that she is supposed to be the doctor, but not even listening when her patient is telling her amox still works for him. They should have put measures into place for this, to always use the oldest first until it's proven not to work and gone from there. Granted we would still eventually get to a post anti-biotic age, it would have been a lot slower in the making and decades or hundreds of years away. But by dropping the latest-and-greatest anti-biotic on every patient as the default solution, we've got here sooner than we should have.