Pros, cons and future of antibiotics

The advantages of antibiotics have been most clearly seen in those acute bacterial infections which had a high mortality before the introduction of antibiotics. The reality of the potential harmful effects of antibiotics, both short term in individual patients and long term in favoring emergent resistance and opportunistic pathogens are discussed. Bacterial resistance makes the standard treatments ineffective, and increases the risk of infection spreading. The shortage of novel antibiotics has strengthened the efforts of genome sequencing to control bacterial resistance. The future would include novel approaches, based on a re-conceptualization of the nature of resistance, disease and prevention.