The Global Fight Against Superbugs: Why Antibiotics Are Failing

In 1928 Alexander Fleming discovered  penicillin, the first real antibiotic. That was the golden era in human history since it saved many lives including the soldiers during the 2nd world war. many anribioticts were invented there after.

Humans have been using Antibiotics for many other things including feeding them to healthy farm animals by the ton, not to treat sick livestock but just to make them grow faster and prevent diseases in overcrowded factory farms. Some even used Antibiotics to treat viral infections and Minor complaints that would've cleared up on their own.

While Antibiotics were helpful the problem is bacteria evolves faster. This means bacteria were getting used to Antibiotics hence becoming antibiotics resistant. For patients who use Antibiotics more often in some cases become Antibiotics resistant. In such cases doctors have to assign higher Antibiotics to treat them. Nevertheless as years pass Antibiotics are becoming more and more resistant to Antibiotics.

scientists have a hard time to develop new Antibiotics never used before to keep the situation in control. In 2015 the world adopted Global Action Plan on Antimicrobial Resistance.

I'm writing this from Kenya, so let me tell you what antimicrobial resistance looks like on the ground here. It's not just statistics in a WHO report. It's daily reality.

When someone walks into a pharmacy in Nairobi with a headache, they can buy amoxicillin over the counter. No prescription. No diagnosis. No doctor involved at all. The pharmacy attendant doesn't know if the customer has a bacterial sinus infection or just tension from a long day. The antibiotics get sold either way. Multiply that by millions of transactions across the continent, and you start to see the scale of the problem.

Fake and substandard medicines flood our markets. Some of these counterfeit antibiotics contain no active ingredient whatsoever. Some contain just a little bit of the drug, enough to give bacteria exactly the kind of sub-lethal exposure that breeds resistance without curing the infection. The WHO estimates that one in ten medical products in developing countries is substandard or falsified. Antibiotics are among the most commonly faked, and Africa gets hit hardest.

The newer antibiotics that still work against resistant infections? They're expensive. Really expensive. When first-line drugs fail and doctors need to reach for second or third-line treatments, the cost can jump from a few dollars to hundreds. For patients already struggling to afford basic care, those drugs might as well not exist. People die not because there's no treatment available anywhere in the world, but because the treatment that exists is financially out of reach.

Written to raise awareness about antimicrobial resistance. Contact [email protected] or visit maarav1.github.io for health research tools.