When my father was a medical student in Cork in the 1940s he saw the first antibiotics brought to Cork and he was suitably impressed by their miraculous qualities. He didn’t stop giving the odd lecture to students himself until he was 75 and by then he was able to tell his students that he had seen the whole arc of antibiotics from their first use to the emergence of antibiotic-resistant super bugs. To be frank, things haven’t improved in the 17 years since. In 2008, my uncle died of MRSA acquired when in hospital for another (successful) procedure. My father kept our family religiously away from antibiotics and no matter how ill we were, we never had them. I used to bitterly watch my classmates popping them like smarties. It looks like our sacrifice may have, however, been insufficient and the days of antibiotics are numbered. Isn’t that a rather depressing thought? Is everything going backwards at the moment?
I am in the process of writing a lecture on antibiotic resistance in a One Health context and I was thinking this morning that even when I was at University in the early 1990, our microbiology lecturer talked about the antibiotic apocalypse. Scary. Your father is a wise man.
Doctor’s daughter too ! I remember taking antibiotics, but not often since my father did not take our case in consideration unless we had at least 39 degrees of fever…
Antibiotics were like sweets when we were growing up. These days I avoid them if possible, they wipe out so many useful bacteria in your gut. Having said that I was nearly hospitalised in South Africa due to a throat infection and one massive injection had me back on my feet in 24 hours. Rather scary that things like hip replacements are going to become high risk due to infection.
Also it would appear that nurses and doctors will have to learn about keeping clean and not spreading infections, something that they have become very careless about. Next time you end up in a hospital keep your eyes open.
Christina, it is a bit grim, isn’t it? Viviane, it’s clearly a case of the cobbler’s children…
Charles, in Ireland there’s a certain amount of harking back to when the hospitals were run by terrifying nuns, there seems to be a feeling that bad and all as they may have been they would never have allowed the lax practices we see today. How true this is I cannot say but I can certainly attest that nuns can be terrifying.