The Idea of an Essay, Volume 2

192 scientific level, the practical peril is even more frightening. The CDC Office of Infectious Diseases (OID) reports that each year between bacterial and fungal infections that have a resistance to the antibiotic designed to treat them, over 20 million illnesses and 23,000 deaths occur (13). For a culture that tends to believe modern medicine has infections and bacterial diseases completely under control, that is a devastating amount of illness and death. Humans can pick up microbes in many different ways such as E. coli in tainted water or meat or MRSA entering through the open wound of a surgical site in a hospital. Because of the incredible variety in bacteria, finding a single solution is completely unrealistic, and this makes fixing the problem even harder. Even if medicine brings one microbe under control, one that harms in a different way or spreads differently may spring up in its place. The practical danger is obvious. Antibiotic resistant bacteria present such a real problem because of their unpredictable ability to change, making appropriate antibiotics useless. Theoretically, any harmful bacteria could develop dangerous resistance to several drugs and become an epidemic. Since this is such a relevant threat, many microbiologists and medical professionals are exploring different options to defeat microbes. Some would say that researchers must simply continue to stay ahead of bacteria by formulating new antibiotics to treat a disease before the old ones become ineffective. Arias and Murray explain that “a concerted effort on the part of academic researchers and their institutions, industry, and government is crucial” to formulate new antibiotics that can successfully exterminate resistant bacteria before they become resistant to all currently available antibiotics (443). Ideally for humans, it would work out this way and a new antibiotic would simply wipe out a bacteria. However, since the original antibiotic did not exterminate the bacteria before it developed resistance, assuming that a new antibiotic would wipe it out is unrealistic, and it also presumes upon the fact that researchers will actually invent new antibiotics for all dangerous bacterial infections. While new research is important, and this solution is theoretically possible, humans cannot count on it in the short term to prevent a major outbreak of an antibiotic resistant disease that could kill many. In addition, society cannot view simply inventing new antibiotics to keep bacteria that have developed resistance to other medications in check as a long term solution because at some