The following Mark's Daily Apple article was written by Mark Sisson, and is narrated by Tina

Lehman.

Antibiotic resistance.

Are we all doomed? The future prospects of antibiotics look grim.

Headline after headline proclaims the mounting resistance to antibiotics among pathogenic bacteria

and the impending inefficacy of our best drugs to fight them.

Antibiotic resistant pig MRSA has been documented moving from pigs to people

in several countries, including Denmark and Holland. That same MRSA has also been found in the

U.S., England, and is likely brewing wherever pigs and animals are intensively raised.

And just recently, researchers discovered that MCR-1,

the gene responsible for resistance to the last line of defense antibiotic,

polymixin, the one we use when everything else has failed,

is transferable between different strains of e- coli.

Formerly relegated to pigs, e-coli and k-numonia bacteria with the MCR-1 mutation have appeared

in human subjects in several Chinese hospitals. Transferring the gene between different

bacterial species is theoretically harder, but that it's possible at all has raised alarms in the scientific community.

It's not just industrial farms and antibiotic overuse causing the resistance.

Even the scientists studying the problem and running experiments with antibiotics

could very well be promoting antibiotic resistance on a larger scale.

This isn't a modern phenomenon.

Humans and bacteria have been embroiled in the antibiotic arms race

for at least as long as we've had modern antibiotics.

...