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If it sometimes seems like the idea of antibiotic resistance, though unsettling, is more theoretical than real, please read on.
Public health officials from Nevada are reporting on a case of a woman who died in Reno in September from an incurable infection. Testing showed the superbug that had spread throughout her system could fend off 26 different antibiotics.
"It was tested against everything that's available in the United States ... and was not effective," said Dr. Alexander Kallen, a medical officer in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's division of health care quality promotion. Although this isn't the first time someone in the US has been infected with pan-resistant bacteria, at this point, it is not common. It is, however, alarming.
[Journal Ref.]: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/66/wr/mm6601a7.htm
(Score: 3, Informative) by HiThere on Sunday January 15 2017, @07:54PM
Not quite true. You've got to get into the mechanisms here, and to remember that there were good reasons why white people evolved from non-white ancestors. There are benefits to having pale skin if you live in an area with minimal insolation. But there are costs when you move into an area with greater insolation. The benefits can be major and the costs are relatively minor...but sufficient to drive evolution in both directions.
The only significant difference between white and non-white people is the degree of melanization, so you must be hypothesizing a disease that attacks the melanocytes. This won't be it's only effect, and the immune system will over time evolve to attack the disease. At that point the recessive white genes will again reappear. We may be talking about a period of a few centuries, but that's trivial for evolution.
FWIW, multiply drug resistant bacteria have been found living in essentially uncontaminated soil, so it's incorrect the think of them as being created de Novo by the use (by people) of antibiotics. And bacteria share their genes between "species" in a way analogous to sex, so what is happening is that the environment has changed to favor an increase in the number of anti-biotics various microbes are resistant to. And the costs of retaining these changes, when measured, seem lower than expected even if they aren't used for a decade or so (which is a huge number of generations). So don't think of this as a problem that will go away unless a predator evolves that preferentially preys on multi-drug resistant bacteria.
P.S.: Most antibiotics are trivial modifications of natural weapons used by soil bacteria, so there has long been reason for microbes to evolve to be resistant to them.
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