Antimicrobial Resistance has emerged as the silent pandemic hitting developing countries the hardest. AMR occurs when bacteria, viruses, or parasites stop responding to medicines. This means common infections become untreatable, surgeries become dangerous, and routine illnesses can kill.
The simplest way to think about it is to imagine that you have a tiny army of bacteria in your body, and antibiotics are the bullets doctors and nurses use to shoot to kill or incapacitate them. These medications do this in a variety of ways, which we do not have the space to go into here.
But bacteria are clever, for they often mutate and learn how to dodge those bullets. When a few survive, they multiply into a new army that the old bullets can no longer touch because they have altered their nature and characteristics. That is how antibiotic resistance develops. There are two main reasons why this is happening so fast, and we shall briefly discuss those reasons to understand better what the scale and scope of the problem actually is.
In the first place, we shoot these bullets at bacteria that are not even dangerous, such as colds, which are mostly caused by viruses and against which antibiotics have no effect. This gives bacteria unnecessary practice at dodging the bullets shot at them.
