A world without antibiotics?

Imagine a world without antibiotics. Common infections are life threatening.
Pneumonia, urinary tract infections and venereal diseases are incurable. Cancer
chemotherapies do not exist. The life expectancy for Canadian men is 47 and 50 for
women.

“Antibiotics are arguably the most important drugs discovered in the 20th century,”
says Gerry Wright, scientific director of the Michael G. DeGroote Institute for Infectious
Disease Research and professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Biomedical
Sciences. “They not only control
infectious diseases such as pneumonia and tuberculosis, they enable many modern
clinical procedures including cancer chemotherapy, surgery, and transplantation.
Without antibiotics, we return to an era where not only do the young and the old
routinely die from infections, but where even healthy individuals are at risk.”

For World Health Day today (April 7), the World Health Organization (WHO) has put a
special focus on antimicrobial resistance and its global spread, particularly the
HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria epidemics. In addition to introducing a six-point
policy package to combat the spread of antimicrobial resistance, WHO is calling on
governments and stakeholders to implement the policies and practices needed to
prevent and counter the emergence of highly resistant superbugs, and to also provide
appropriate care to those seriously affected by these microbes.