Revelation 6:7,8 NCV When the Lamb opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth living creature say, "Come!"8 I looked, and there before me was a pale horse. Its rider was named death, and Hades was following close behind him. They were given power over a fourth of the earth to kill people by war, by starvation, by disease, and by the wild animals of the earth.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control says that 2 million Americans have been sickened by some strain of drug-resistant bacteria and around 23,000 died because their infections could not be treated.
A deputy director for the CDC’s Division of Healthcare Quality Promotion says that the overuse of antibiotics contributes heavily to the problem.
“Very recently we looked at how good antibiotic prescriptions are in this country, and about half are unnecessary or the wrong antibiotic,” Dr. Michael Bell told CNBC. “That’s a lot of room for improvement.”
Federal officials are attempting to spur drug companies into creating new antibiotics. The Generating Antibiotic Incentives Now act, or GAIN, gives companies an additional five years of market-based exclusivity for drugs if they are produced for a “qualified infectious disease.”
“If you move to the post-antibiotic era, that means all of the advances of modern medicine could be reversed,” Cubist Pharmaceuticals’ Dr. Obi Umeh told CNBC. “Patients who had that infection in which there was no treatment option, they were in the post-antibiotic era.”
