Beware the Rise of Antibiotic-Resistant Microbes

摘要

Many People can not even remember when nothing could be done to help those with serious bacterial infections. In the past, bacterial pneumonia often was referred to as "the old man's friend" because it was considered a merciful cause of death. A typical hospital ward in the 1930s was filled with patients suffering from pneumonia, typhoid fever, and other deadly, untreatable diseases. The introduction of antibiotics in the mid 1930s "heralded the opening of an era in which literally millions of people—children, adults, and the elderly, all slated for an early death or invalidism—were spared," Walsh McDermott pointed out in the Johns Hopkins Medical Journal in 1982.