A plague worse than AIDS?

The issue of antibiotic-resistant disease is a very serious one. It actually exacts a greater death toll than “modern plagues” like AIDS.

Compounding the problem is that not only are potent antibiotics over-prescribed in modern medicine, they are also widely over-used in agriculture – a fact that is grossly overlooked. In fact, agricultural antibiotic use is a MAJOR source of human antibiotic consumption, which contributes to the rise of antibiotic resistant “superbugs” like methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA).

According to a study published in October, 2007 in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), there were close to 100,000 cases of invasive MRSA infections in the United States in 2005, which lead to more than 18,600 deaths.

To put that number into perspective, HIV/AIDS killed 17,000 people that year.

The numbers are even more staggering when you include ALL hospital infections, not just MRSA, as approximately 1.7 million Americans contracted infections during hospital stays in 2007, and a subsequent 100,000 people perished from these diseases, according to the U.S. Center of Disease Control (CDC).

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