Many people die each day from diseases that used to be curable by antibiotics. Infections of all kinds have grown resistant to the drug, because of its overuse. Antibiotics are routinely added to animal feed for animals raised for meat production even for animals who are not ill, to prevent infections in over crowded conditions and promote weight gain. People who eat the animals ingest the antibiotic at the same time. Even people who do not eat meat are not immune to this since the animals waste is used as fertiliser for vegetables. Also, courses of antibiotics prescribed to humans are often not finished. This means that the bug it is fighting is not entirely wiped out and develops ways to resist the drug. Antibiotics are also prescribed wrongly, so that their use is more widespread than it should be. Finally, few new antibiotics are being developed. The answer is use to use these drugs more sparingly, and to develop more. There are also alternative treatments which should be taken seriously, such as bacteriophages which have been developed in France and are used as an antibiotic alternative in places like the country Georgia.

Antibiotics have saved millions of lives—but their misuse and overuse is making them less effective as bacteria develop resistance. Despite scientists’ warnings, antibiotic prescriptions in many countries continue to soar.

Venki Ramakrishnan, a Nobel Prize-winning chemist based at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology at the University of Cambridge, tells us about the importance of gaining a better understanding of the use and misuse of these wonder drugs.

There are several aspects to the problem of antibiotic resistance. It’s very important to have highly specific targets, which kill the particular bacterium that’s causing the disease rather than using a spectrum of antibiotics that should only be used as a last resort when you don’t know what the disease is caused by and you don’t have time.

I think that governments really need to get involved in the development of new antibiotics. They have to think of this as something generally good for society, the same reason that governments fund education, roads, police, defense and so on. This is one case where governments need to act.

Antibiotic resistance is a global issue nowadays according to world health organization and the CDC. Although there is no perfect soolution to antibiotic resistance however we can adept few every day practices to atleast handle it, the most important one is to complete your dose of medicines as prescribed by the physician because failing to do so makes the bacteria resistant to high dosage. Another most recent approach by scientists was altering the bacteria; genome through epigenetics to cope up with the ever increasing antibiotic resistance, but all in all always complete your dosage. Hope thats helps.