The world appears to be waking up to the fact of impending disaster as a result of the misuse or over-use of antibiotics (‘Weekend Being’ page – “Sick? Go easy on the antibiotics”, April 10). In 1945, while accepting the Nobel Prize for discovering penicillin, Alexander Fleming warned of a future in which antibiotics had been used with abandon and bacteria had grown resistant to them. Today, this future is imminent. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has also sounded a similar alarm. It says: “If we’re not careful, we will soon be in a post-antibiotic era. In fact, for some patients and some microbes, we are already there.” What is even more disconcerting is how antibiotics are finding their way into the food chain.
H.N. Ramakrishna,
Bengaluru
