Three days before the big vacation to Europe and the whole family has been struck down with a virus. Fortunately, lo and behold, there in the medicine cabinet is just the solution: half a bottle of man’s modern miracle of antibiotics. It’s leftover from and old prescription, so it might not be the right dosage, but no harm done, right?

Wrong. Such misuse and abuse of antibiotics can contribute to what is hailed by the US Center for Disease Control as “one of the world’s most pressing public health issues”:  antibiotic-resistant bacteria and untreatable infections.
           Imagine an illness no doctor can treat. This sort of nightmare has come to life in the form of antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections. One such bacterium is staphylococcus aureus, the most common cause of the notorious staph infections causing around 500,000 Americans to be hospitalized each year.  The number of people infected by staph each year has been climbing since the 1950s, according to a report released by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (www.niaid.nih.gov).
Though it was easily treatable in the 1950s, today, 98 percent of staphylococcus aureus is immune to penicillin and many other types of antibiotics, according to the NIAID report. The resistant staph strains are known as methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA. MRSA is the particularly troubling form of staph, as few antibiotics are still effective against it, according to Advanced Placement Biology teacher Dacotah Swett.
The steady increase in staph infections since the 1950s is a result of the modern invention of antibiotics, according to Qizhi Tang, Ph.D., assistant professor at the UC- San Francisco’s Department of Surgery. While staph existed before, antibiotics have inadvertently aided the development of stronger strains of the disease. Swett describes this co-evolution as an “arms race.”  Essentially, she explained, the more often bacteria are exposed to antibiotics, the more likely they are to mutate into resistant strains because of natural selection. Strong bacteria, which have a mutation that gives them immunity from antibiotics, survive and produce the next more deadly strain. This arms race pits pathogens against the scientists who struggle to invent new drugs to combat them.
Staph isn’t the only antibiotic-resistant disease that scientists must confront. Diseases such as tuberculosis, gonorrhea, malaria and childhood ear infections continue to develop resistance, making treatment increasingly difficult. According to the NIAID report, “more than 70 percent of the bacteria that cause hospital-acquired infections are resistant to at least one of the antibiotics most commonly used to treat them.”
While all pathogens will eventually mutate and develop immunity to a given type of antibiotics, the process is hastened by antibiotics misuse. A seemingly innocent error, as simple as not finishing a prescription when symptoms do not persist, can cause problems in the future for everyone. “A person might be prescribed 10 days of antibiotics,” Tang said. “It’s hard to take 10 days of antibiotics three times a day, so when the symptoms stop, (the person) stops. When you take a partial dose, you may have some residual bacteria left that aren’t enough to cause symptoms. The dosage tapers off and the remaining bacteria mutates into an antibiotic-resistant strain.”
This survival-of-the-fittest bacteria selection means trouble for the next person to be infected with the same bacteria, which has already developed a resistance to the original antibiotic. “You could be raising the next generation of antibiotic-resistant bacteria in your own body,” �Swett said.
An uninformed public seems to be the root of the problem; however, sometimes professionals make things worse.  Illness is caused by either viral or bacterial pathogens, according to Tang. Antibiotics are effective only against bacterial pathogens, which are either killed or prevented from growing by the right prescription. However, properly determining whether a patient’s ailment is caused by a virus or by bacteria requires lab analysis, the results of which return the day after an exam at the earliest. Meanwhile, patients go home untreated and unsatisfied. Doctors therefore often prescribe unnecessary antibiotics. “They prescribe antibiotics reasoning that if the pathogen is viral and the antibiotics are ineffective, no harm is done,” Tang said. “This actually makes it worse.” Over-exposure to the same antibiotics, particularly when they are unnecessary, promotes the development of antibiotic resistance. “It is very important that antibiotics are not overused,” Tang said. “When you use antibiotics you are giving bacteria a chance to develop resistance.”
Tang also suggests that doctors and hospitals rotate different antibiotic treatments to prevent bacteria from being overly exposed to any one, as the less often bacteria is exposed to one particular drug, the less likely it is to develop immunity. 
As with many ailments, spotting a staph infection in the early stages is instrumental to an easy and speedy recovery. Generally staph begins as a mild skin infection that can become any of a multitude of different symptoms depending on what part of the body is infected and with which strain. Infection in the lungs becomes pneumonia, while bloodstream infections can lead to a fatal circulatory collapse, according to Swett. Other strains of staph, such as USA300, known as “flesh-eating” bacteria, destroy skin and muscle tissues. In some cases, limb amputation is a last resort to prevent further spread.
Perhaps most frightening about MRSA is not only that it is becoming increasingly difficult to treat, nor that it can cause a myriad of diseases resulting from body tissue infection, but how easily it spreads. Staph infections run rampant worldwide in jails, nursing homes and hospitals wards especially, often infecting surgical wounds or the elderly with weakened immune systems, according to the NIAID report. It can be spread through open wounds, through the air, and on contaminated surfaces.
Hospitals are breeding grounds for new strains of staph because of the extensive use of antibiotics. But, surprisingly, inadequate sanitation is one cause of the staph spread, mostly because health care professionals can pass bacteria from patient to patient if they do not wash their hands, according to Tang. Something as simple as proper sanitation can slow the growing strength of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
Ultimately, The average person should take steps to prevent being infected by an antibiotic-resistant disease, as well as to prevent the development of more by being properly informed about when antibiotic treatment is appropriate, Tang said. “We need to be ahead of the bugs to keep multi-drug resistant bugs under control,” she said.  “More misuse of antibiotics will likely hasten the rise and spread of superbugs.  If we completely lose this battle, we would be on the fast track back to the pre-antibiotic era before the 1940s when humans were plagued by and frequently died from bacterial infections.”