(OPINION) The rise of the “superbugs” is here. The death toll is already in the millions each year, and it won’t be too long before “superbugs” are killing tens of millions of people each year.
In my last book, I identified a number of long-term trends that threaten to collapse our society, and now you can add this one to the list. The clock really is ticking for humanity, but most people in the general population simply do not understand what we are facing. They just assume that life will go on as it always has, but that is simply not going to be possible.
If you are not familiar with “antimicrobial resistance”, the following is a decent definition from the official CDC website… Antimicrobial resistance happens when germs like bacteria and fungi develop the ability to defeat the drugs designed to kill them.
That means the germs are not killed and continue to grow. Resistant infections can be difficult, and sometimes impossible, to treat.
According to Dr. Chris Murray, antimicrobial resistance “is actually now one of the leading causes of death in the world”. It accounts for more deaths than tuberculosis, it accounts for more deaths than malaria, and it accounts for more deaths than HIV/AIDS. So we are talking about a crisis that is already incredibly serious.
Sadly, this is just the beginning. USA Today is reporting that antimicrobial resistance is now killing more than 5 million people a year, but the death toll is “expected to grow into the tens of millions within a few decades”…
In 2019, the last year data is available, more than 2.8 million Americans had antimicrobial-resistant infections and more than 35,000 died, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Worldwide, deaths already top 5 million a year and are expected to grow into the tens of millions within a few decades.
If “superbugs” are soon killing tens of millions of people per year, that will mean that there will be hundreds of millions of deaths by the end of this century.
And that is actually an optimistic forecast. There are some that believe that the death toll could be far worse because “bacteria are mutating to evade antibiotics at a pace far faster than many researchers had previously forecast”. Scientists tell us that one of the big reasons this is happening is because we have been overusing antibiotics.
Way too often, doctors are prescribing antibiotics for their patients when they don’t really need them. But even more importantly, in recent decades it has become common practice to feed antibiotics to livestock so that they will get bigger…
The commercial raising of animals for food has contributed to the problem. For decades, breeders have fed their livestock antibiotics. At first, they started out trying to help sick animals get well.
But they noticed that animals fed antibiotics got big faster. So it became standard practice to include antibiotics in the feed of every animal, from poultry to fish to pigs to cows.
So now resistance to antibiotics is spreading like wildfire, and we are seeing some tremendous tragedies as a result. For example, when a 24-year-old woman scraped her knee on some rocks in 2012, she never imagined it would lead to all four limbs being amputated…(READ MORE)
