Thursday Evening Must-Read: The Cost of Our Too-Rapid Exhaustion of the Global Antibiotic Commons
Maryn McKenna: Imagining the Post-Antibiotics Future:
A few years ago, I started looking online to fill in chapters of my family history.... My great-uncle Joe.... Through one of the scrapes, an infection set in.... Desperate to save his life, the men from his firehouse lined up to give blood. Nothing worked. He was thirty when he died, in March 1938.... Five years after my great-uncle’s death, penicillin changed medicine forever. Infections that had been death sentences—--from battlefield wounds, industrial accidents, childbirth--suddenly could be cured in a few days.... Lately, though, I read it differently. In Joe’s story, I see what life might become if we did not have antibiotics any more...
