In a moment, the antibiotics They were the salvation of the world. However, today when you go to the doctor for any ailment, you are prescribed antibiotics and then you are cured. over-prescription, patients who do not finish their full course of antibiotics and a very intelligent evolution on the part of the bacteria have led to the antibiotic resistance become a widespread problem.
But what if penicillin had never been discovered? What would a world be like without antibiotics?
Would we all be wearing masks? Would it be more luxurious and exclusive health care? Would the world population be as large as it is today?
This is what would happen if we never discovered antibiotics.
In September 1928, Alexander Fleming returned from his summer vacation to his London laboratory. where did you notice a strange growth on a old Petri dish that would change the world forever. It seemed that in Fleming’s absence, a colony of mold had sprouted and began to dissolve the bacteria growing on the plate.
Penicillium notatum was studied, developed and purified over the next 10 years and, in 1942, it was successfully used to treat Anne Miller for a deadly infection after a miscarriage.
Since then, penicillin has had a variety of uses: treatment of life-threatening diseases. As well as prevention of infections after surgeries reduction in the number of deaths and amputations in every major conflict since World War II.
But since this “miracle cure” was a serendipitous discovery, what if it had simply been overlooked?
penicillin it is not the only antibiotic in the world, but its discovery almost uniquely inspired the search for more. For example, in 1940, soil microbiologist Selman Waksman published his research on how microorganisms in soil could prevent the growth of infectious bacteria.
Their findings led Waksman and his colleagues to develop several important antibiotics, such as streptomycin, which can treat tuberculosis, plague, and rat-bite fever. But Waksman’s work grew out of his fascination with Fleming’s discovery and the research that he followed. This means that, without penicillin, other crucial antibiotics would not have been discovered for some time.
Penicillin may have saved more than 200 million lives since its invention, but if you think our lives without antibiotics they would be much shorter and more painful, hold the violin for just one more hit. The reality is that our lives might not be so different after all.
In the mid-1930s, a class of synthetic drugs known as sulfonamides, or sulfonamides, were shown to be. They fight bacteria and cure infections. They were the first “wonder drugs” before being overshadowed by penicillin and other antibiotics during the following decade. So it’s likely that without penicillin we would simply have become dependent on sulfa drugs.
The scientific and medical communities would certainly have developed stronger and more sophisticated sulfonamides to deal with more complex diseases as they evolved. And yet, we would also continue to face the same problems that currently threaten antibiotics today.
Even as Fleming celebrated his success, he was cautious. Accepting his Nobel Prize in 1945, Fleming warned that the misuse of penicillin could lead to bacterial resistance to it. b In other words, as we are realizing more and more today, penicillin as a “miracle cure” could soon become ineffective.
The question now is not “what if we don’t discover antibiotics?” but “what if they stop working?”
What do you think? Can we survive in a world without antibiotics? We can’t predict the future, and that’s what scares him. But then again, we never know when we might accidentally discover a cure for millions of people around the world.
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