The Greatest Threat The World Faces Today

In the world that we live in today there are many threats, some larger than others, which could cause a global catastrophe. While I feel that among the leading world powers the greatest threat would be terrorism, one threat that the entire world faces, leading powers included, is disease; more specifically, bacterial resistance. With the ever-growing population that the world is facing, people are living closer and closer to each other. This allows certain organisms and particles to spread from person to person much more easily. With all of these hand-to-hand encounters, disease is sure to spread among countless populations. However, with our modern medical technology, we are able to treat sicknesses such as the cold or flu at home with simple medicine. Appendicitis, which back in the days would have been a death sentence, can now simply be cured and the patient can return to their normal lives in a matter of days.
Much is this is able to happen because of antibiotics. Before the discovery of antibiotics, a small cut could kill you if it were to get infected. Infection was one of the leading causes of death. Wounded soldiers would die in the hospital from infections, and even today, in diseases such as AIDS, the virus itself doesn’t kill you, but the infections and small colds do, since the body’s immune system can’t fight off the bacteria. It’s easy to say that bacteria are very deadly, but we just have the resources to combat them. All of this could change if bacteria become resistant to antibiotics.
In one specific occurrence certain prisons in Russia, to people that are sentenced to serve time there, are the same as a death sentence. The bacteria that causes Tuberculosis is very common in the prison cells, so prisoners receive antibiotics to combat the disease. However, some bacteria are able to survive the first level of treatments and if the patient isn’t further treated, those bacteria with the gene of resistance to the antibiotic multiply. When they multiply enough for the symptoms of Tuberculosis to return, antibiotics will no longer do any good and the person will ultimately die.
I believe that this is the world’s largest threat, since so many people use antibiotics when they catch a cold or get an infection. With bacteria that are resistant to the antibiotics on the rise in population, unless we discover a new way to fight the bacteria, this could become a huge problem.

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/261677/problems_posed_by_antibioticresistant.html?cat=58