Modern transportation, ecological destruction, overpopulation and pollution help infectious diseases spread around the world.

Modern planes, trains, and cars help microbes travel. They hitch a ride inside an infected person, animal or insect and go thousands of miles in a matter of days or even hours.

By invading the virgin jungles and rainforests of Africa, Asia and South America we unleash unknown microbes that may grow in the many poorly maintained, overcrowded, unhygienic and polluted mega-cities around the world.

Pollution fouls water supplies that make ideal breeding grounds for microbes. The very water we drink may transmit disease-causing microbes.

Mutating Microbes:

The Deadly Dilemma of Drug Resistance

The antibiotic Penicillin is a fungus natural defense against harmful bacteria. Humans have simply borrowed this antibiotic to help defend their own bodies.

But these defenses sometimes fail. Bacteria can mutate and become resistant to antibiotics. This means that antibiotics cant stop the bacteria from harming your body. At least 24 different kinds of bacteria have become resistant to one or more antibiotics, including those that cause meningitis, scarlet fever and pneumonia. Bacteria continuously change so researchers have to constantly develop new antibiotics to fight them.

Bacteria quickly develop resistance when people do not use anitbiotics properly. There are many ways people can misuse antibiotics. In some cases, a persons immune system is too weak to mop up the bacteria remaining after treatment with an antibiotic. Other times, the patient stops taking the medication too soon. Occasionally, patients are given the wrong kind of antibiotic. All three scenarios allow more resistant strains of bacteria to spread and reproduce.

Pharmaceutical companies are always developing new drugs for use in the fight against disease. But we must use antibiotics wisely and carefully if we are to slow bacterias rush to resistance.