Between Climate Change and Antibiotic Resistance, I Don’t Know What’s Going to Kill Us First

But there are things we can do to help

The world is dying.

There really is no nice way to put this, no flowery language I can use and no lies left to tell. The earth is dying.

However, some days I wake up in a cold sweat over ice caps, other days I panic over people not finishing their antibiotic prescription because they feel better.

Between climate change and antibiotic resistance, I’m not sure what is going to get us first.

Climate change

As I stated in a previous article, environmental policies currently concentrate solely on individual action when we should instead be holding the industrial producers of plastic financially responsible for their waste e.g. this fixation on the banning of plastic straw to remove plastics from the ocean.

Yes, we should all push to be more environmentally conscious however we can’t ignore that the worlds richest emit the most Carbon. With an Oxfam study finding the richest 10 per cent of people produce half of the planet’s individual-consumption-based fossil fuel emissions, while the poorest 50 per cent — about 3.5 billion people — contribute only 10 per cent. They estimated that the world’s richest 10 per cent have carbon footprints that are 60 times higher as the poorest 10 per cent.

Earlier reports stated we had 11 years left to prevent irreversible damage from climate change however, other figures are pointing to only 18 months.

In the UK the Met Office revealed that their 10 hottest years on record have all occurred in the last 20 years. The core issue is that businesses and consumers see sustainability as a cost and obligation versus benefit. Most of the burden of change rests on whether the rich decide to finally pay attention and change their lifestyle.

According to Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, founder and now director emeritus of the Potsdam Climate Institute, “The climate math is brutally clear: While the world can’t be healed within the next few years, it may be fatally wounded by negligence until 2020.”

Antibiotic resistance

Antibiotics are medicines used to prevent and treat bacterial infections.

Antibiotic resistance is the ability of a microorganism to withstand the effects of antibiotics. The resistance mainly happens naturally via random mutations. Once this gene is generated, the bacteria can transfer the genetic information and through natural selection, passes this trait to their offspring, which will be a fully resistant generation.

It is because of this that antibiotic resistance is one of the biggest threats to global health, food security, and development today. We have a growing number of infections — Tuberculosis, Gonorrhoea, MRSA and C. diff — that are becoming harder to treat due to the antibiotics used to treat them becoming less effective. All of the above are also examples of superbugs (or multidrug-resistant bacteria) — a bacterium that carries several resistance genes.

Antibiotic resistance occurs naturally, but the misuse of antibiotics in humans and animals is accelerating the process. It is already making infections harder to treat, leading to thousands of deaths a year through drug-resistant superbugs. With previous research finding that these medicines were often prescribed for conditions that are self-healing, such as sore throats, or for viruses, which do not even respond to antibiotics.

Everyone is at risk of antibiotic-resistant infections, but those at the greatest risk for antibiotic-resistant infections are young children, cancer patients, and people over the age of 60.

Worst case scenario is that we get to a stage where we can no longer treat these diseases that we thought were ‘cured’ and individuals start dying from them once again. Standard medical procedures would become extremely risky and even a simple cut could kill.

What we can do to help

However, with both, there are steps we can take to help the situation!

With antibiotic resistance we should;

• Take medication as prescribed and exactly as directed.
• Ensure you take the entire course of medications, so there is none left over to “save.”
• Never take someone else’s medications and do not share antibiotics.
• Also, do not pressure your healthcare provider to prescribe medications. Your illness may be viral therefore antibiotics won’t help!

When it comes to climate change:

• Just be environmentally and waste-conscious.
• Reduce your meat content.
• Vote for people who want to help!

However, as I have said, a huge part of cutting our carbon footprint depends on what the rich decide to do, but that doesn’t mean we can’t do our bit. We don’t need to be perfect as long as we try.

ZUVA is an award-winning Leeds based spoken word artist, poet and freelance writer. Click here to join her weekly mail list to get her top 10* tips on editing like a pro!

She is the editor of An Injustice! A intersectional millennial publication. Check here for now to join!