Last year, Tom Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), announced the United States would "soon be in a post-antibiotic era," due to drug-resistant bacteria from overuse of antibiotics.
Are we there already?
Tens of thousands of newborns in India are dying every year as a result of once-treatable infections. India sees nearly one-third of the world's newborn deaths, according to The New York Times. Last year alone, 58,000 infants died from bacterial infections; although that number represents a mere fraction of the 800,000 newborns that die in India every year, doctors are predicting a rise in infant mortality.
"Reducing newborn deaths in India is one of the most important public health priorities in the world, and this will require treating an increasing number of neonates who have sepsis and pneumonia," said Chief of Pediatrics at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences Dr. Vinod Paul, according to The New York Times. "But if resistant infections keep growing, that progress could slow, stop or even reverse itself. And that would be a disaster for not only India but the entire world."
The "superbugs" have spread around the world - including the United States, where the problem is exacerbated by antibiotic treatments on farms and overuse in hospitals, according Business Insider via MSN.
In the United States in 2013, a quarter of a million died because the bacteria they were being treated for resisted the antibiotics, according to Business Insider. Some strains of "nightmare bacteria" are becoming common in 42 states across the nation, killing half of those infected.
Diseases like gonorrhea, the STD infecting more than 100 million a year, and tuberculosis, an acute lung infection that has seen a rise in the numbers of cases, are supposed to be treated with antibiotics, but some strains have become resistant.
If bacteria won't respond to antibiotics, doctors sometime prescribe carbapenems, a stronger class of drugs, but Indian scientists reported in 2012 that half the bacteria they tested proved resistant to carbapenems, according to Nature.
Earlier in 2014, the U.K.'s Chief Medical Officer Sally Davies predicted an "apocalyptic scenario" if these "superbugs" aren't brought under control, according to The Guardian.
