BACTERIAL RESISTANCE TO ANTIBIOTICS
p perhaps the greatest medical advance of this century, and one of the greatest of all time, was the discovery that toxins pro- duced by fungi could kill the bacteria that cause human dis- ease. While arsenic compounds had been used for syphilis since Paul Ehrlich introduced them in 1910, the antibiotic era did not really begin until Alexander Fleming noted one day in 1929 that bac- teria in his petri dishes would not grow properly in the vicinity of contaminating colonies of the mold Penicillium. Why should this have been? Why did the most effective antibiotics come from molds? Antibiotics are chemical warfare agents that evolved in fungi and bac- teria to protect them from.pathogens and competitors. They were shaped by millions of years of trial-and-error selection to exploit the special vulnerabilities of bacteria but to be nontoxic to the fungi.
A wide variety of fungal and bacterial products that are safe for most people can devastate the bacteria that cause tuberculosis, pneu- monia, and many other infections. For several decades now, these antibiotics have given economically advanced societies a golden age of relief from bacterial disease. A combination of public health mea- sures and antibiotics made the death rates from infectious disease fall so rapidly that in 1969 the Surgeon General of the United States felt justified in announcing that it was “time to close the book on infectious disease.”
