Pharmaceutical Pollution and Superbugs: A Threat to Humanity, Part 1 of 2

On today’s program, we’ll learn more about AMR and discover why it’s become a severe global health threat. Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) occurs when the bacteria, viruses, fungi, or parasites that cause the infectious diseases mutate over time and become resistant to the existing drugs. AMR makes infections much harder to treat while increasing the risk of spreading disease, and even death.

Antimicrobial resistance has become a global concern. In addition to causing more deaths, experts believe that AMR will also affect the global economy, resulting in more frequent and prolonged hospitalizations, increased healthcare costs, higher costs for second-line drugs, and higher losses in productivity. The growing number of drug-resistant infectious diseases is especially concerning for healthcare professionals.

What is causing this ever-increasing number of AMR pathogens? Many experts agree that it is due to the massive overuse of drugs, particularly antibiotics, by humans and animal-people. “We have flooded the world with antibiotics, and bacteria are quickly becoming immune to everything we throw at them.” “We know that there's a very tight link between the tonnage – not milligrams as in humans, but tonnage -of antibiotics used in agriculture and the emergence of resistance.”

Recently, the number of drugs entering the Earth’s waterways and causing “pharmaceutical pollution” has become a growing concern. One of the concerns about pharmaceutical pollution is how it affects aquatic life. Pharmaceutical pollution also has a dangerous impact on humans. When bacteria develop resistance to drugs, it creates a global health risk for the outbreak of infectious diseases. Dr. Wilkinson warned, “The World Health Organization and UN and other organizations say antimicrobial resistance is the single greatest threat to humanity – it’s a next pandemic.”