You see, before what you see in the picture below came into existence, everything was a risk from childbirth, play, cut, wounds, and even disease, and funny enough, the risk of dying was higher than the risk of surviving.
Antibiotics, being of different varieties from Streptomycin, to Penicillin, erythromycin, Doxycycline, cephalosporin, amoxicillin, and so on, do just one job and that job is to fight and eliminate bacteria. Although, they do it in different ways and funny enough, they are natural chemicals produces microbes to kill other microbes and have been in use for millions of years but it wasn't until 1928 that we discovered its true meaning and importance by accident.
It was the year 1928 when British Chemist Alexander Fleming went back to his lab to see that a mold had landed on his bacteria culture on his petri dish. While the discovery of a mold in his petri dish culture was a surprise to him, what was more surprising was when he noticed that the mold had formed a kill zone on the petri dish thereby wiping out all the bacteria in the zone. He decided to isolate the chemical that was killing the bacteria from the mold and that was where he came up with the name Penicillin and it was among the first antibiotics to bring a revolution to the world of medicine saving millions of lives even during war times and still does so till date.
During the early days of penicillin, its supply was so small and its demand so high that people who took the drug had to urinate so the unused penicillin can be extracted. Penicillin or the arrival of antibiotics in full was not meant to destroy all types of bacteria. In fact, there are a lot of bacteria that are not harmful including the ones in our gut but then when we think of bacteria like Salmonella, Campylobacter, Clostridium difficile and a lot more are a reason to use antibiotics even when the microbial floral is also being destroyed.
Just like every weapon, the problem with antibiotics is not in their use but rather in their misuse and when antibiotics are misused, then it gives rise to another problem which you probably might have heard off. At least, you might have heard of superbugs that are resistant to antibiotics because they evolved to resist them. Scientists did a study on resistance to antibiotics using E.coli and they found out that the bacteria evolved to create new strands that were growing even when the concentration of the antibiotics was increased and it took the E.coli just 11 days to conquer the most concentrated pat of the antibiotics which was up to 1000 times concentration.
When we take antibiotics without proper understanding, the bacteria that mutates are the ones that remain and this bacteria will keep producing and when they do, they will not reproduce bacteria that are susceptible to the antibiotics, rather they will reproduce bacteria that have the same molecular makeup and are resistant to the antibiotics which means they reproduce super resistant drug.
You might say that you are not overusing antibiotics but the livestock farmers in your environment are probably doing so as they will add it to the meals of livestock, inject them with it, and and put it in their water. These animals end up on our tables as food but also as antibiotic carriers into your body. They could also affect the animals directly causing the antibiotic resistant bacteria to mutate in the animal and these bacteria can find their way to our crops which still gets to our tables and into our body.
Wait before I leave, I am not saying we should stop antibiotics in total because we cannot stop using them but we need to learn to be smart with taking drugs, we should know when it is right to take them and when it is not, we should not always demand for antibiotics at the hospital or pharmacy without a proper check and we should always complete our dose. On a final note, we should not use antibiotics to treat viruses and fungi we should use them for bacterial purposes only.
Reference.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5534434/
https://newsinhealth.nih.gov/2014/02/stop-spread-superbugs
https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/antibiotics/antibiotic-antimicrobial-resistance/
https://www.nesta.org.uk/feature/antibiotic-resistant-bacteria-10-worst/
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/antimicrobial-resistance