Samantha's reading response to chapter 8 in The Antibiotic Paradox

I really enjoyed reading this chapter because it made me think a lot more about the behaviors of physicians and patients and antibiotics. It’s rather frightening to hear about outbreaks in countries such as Australia, Zaire, and Tajikistan and to hear how difficult it was to control the epidemics that occurred when antibiotic resistant strains of common bacteria occurred. The idea that there could possibly be complete antibiotic failure in the future is rather frightening. If antibiotics completely failed us in the future due to antibiotic resistance in bacteria than we would be set back hundreds of years medically and I also believe this would have an effect socially as well. This is why I feel it is very important to take a direct approach on education about antibiotics just as Finland did when they had an erythromycin resistant strain of Streptococcus. By using a country-wide campaign they were able to diminish the resistance rate from approximately 20% to 8% nationwide. If our country took a similar stance on antibiotics as a whole and decided to start a country-wide campaign on the correct use of antibiotics I believe we could see a similar effect occur with our resistance rate. Too many individuals misuse antibiotics because they don’t use them as prescribed or they use them for something other than what they were prescribed for. If individuals used antibiotics correctly and hand washed more frequently this alone could have a large effect on our resistance rate. But if we compounded these two behaviors with education on the current uses of antibiotics, improved public sanitation, discovering more antibiotics along with alternatives to antibiotics we could help deter if not eliminate antibiotic resistant bacteria.

On another note while I was reading the section about ‘what if resistant bacteria ran rampant’ I couldn’t help but picture a horror movie of sorts….specifically of the zombie nature. I started to relate the ‘what if’ scenario to the background setting for Zombieland. In Zombieland, a man had eaten a burger infected with something which had caused him to basically turn into a zombie. Because no one knew what was happening and the man was left to roam free, the ‘disease’ spread and more and more people became infected until only a small handful of individuals around the world were not infected. This storyline illustrated what would happen if individuals were let to take antibiotics at their every whim. Only the dominant strains of resistant bacteria would survive and antibiotics would be completely ineffective, leaving us to die of once treatable diseases; almost like the Dark Ages all over again. Also this section made me think of Left 4 Dead in the concept that some individuals would be carrying these resistant bacteria without even knowing it and so they would continue to infect people while not becoming infected themselves, or at least not right away. The decontamination areas at country borders I think would only be effective for so long until someone snuck across the border that was already infected and then they too would spread the infection. All in all this section brought up a few post-apocalypse storyline which made relating to the material much easier.