Seriously though, we can forget about getting 7 billion people to use antibiotics safely. Really- forget about it. Not even education helps- after all it's doctors and pharmacists who are primarily responsible for this mess we're in [1].
Our only chance is to find some other way to deal with bacteria -perhaps that phage therapy thing- otherwise we may as well just accept that X million people will die every year because of bacterial infections. Not to mention, of all the conditions that might be safe to treat given antibiotics, but not without them (you know, open heart surgery, brain surgery, that sort of thing).
[1] Here's a childhood memory: my family doctor telling me I have a viral infection ... and prescribing antibiotics. Almost every year until I was 18 and stopped taking the damn things on my own, for entirely irrelevant reasons (I thought they were making me worse) (I got better).
Seriously though, we can forget about getting 7 billion people to use antibiotics safely. Really- forget about it. Not even education helps- after all it's doctors and pharmacists who are primarily responsible for this mess we're in [1].
Our only chance is to find some other way to deal with bacteria -perhaps that phage therapy thing- otherwise we may as well just accept that X million people will die every year because of bacterial infections. Not to mention, of all the conditions that might be safe to treat given antibiotics, but not without them (you know, open heart surgery, brain surgery, that sort of thing).
[1] Here's a childhood memory: my family doctor telling me I have a viral infection ... and prescribing antibiotics. Almost every year until I was 18 and stopped taking the damn things on my own, for entirely irrelevant reasons (I thought they were making me worse) (I got better).