Importance in health care

Antibiotic resistance is one of the most serious global threats to public health. In hospitals, resistant infections like MRSA, Clostridioides difficile, and E. coli are harder to treat, spread more easily, and lead to longer hospital stays, higher medical costs, and increased risk of death. For example, MRSA alone was responsible for over 323,000 hospitalizations and 10,600 deaths in the U.S. in 2017, costing more than $1.7 billion in healthcare expenses (Marciniak, Tyczewska, & Grzywacz, 2024). Similarly, C. difficile has surpassed MRSA as the leading hospital-acquired infection and is responsible for up to 25% mortality in elderly patients and over 14,000 deaths annually in the U.S. (Dilnessa et al., 2022). These infections often emerge following antibiotic use, as broad-spectrum drugs disrupt healthy microbiota and give resistant strains the opportunity to multiply. When treatment options fail, infections become persistent and dangerous, especially in immunocompromised patients. Because of this, antibiotic resistance has been classified as one of the top ten global public health threats by the World Health Organization (Marciniak et al., 2024). Hospitals must prioritize infection control practices and antibiotic stewardship to slow the rise of resistance and protect patients from complications that were once easily preventable.

This threat becomes even more alarming when considering how quickly bacteria can adapt to antibiotics compared to the time it takes to develop new treatments. In a striking visual demonstration, the Kishony Lab at Harvard Medical School showed how E. coli bacteria evolved resistance across a giant "mega-plate" Petri dish within just 11 days, progressively surviving concentrations of antibiotics that were previously lethal. This experiment mirrors what happens in hospitals—bacteria exposed to sublethal antibiotic doses quickly evolve survival strategies, often before new antibiotics can be researched, tested, and approved. The video underscores the urgent imbalance between the speed of bacterial evolution and the slow, costly process of antibiotic development, reinforcing the need for rigorous antibiotic stewardship and investment in novel drug research. 

Reference:
Dilnessa, T., Getaneh, A., Hailu, W., Moges, F., & Gelaw, B. (2022). Prevalence and antimicrobial resistance pattern of Clostridium difficile among hospitalized diarrheal patients: A systematic review and meta-analysis. PLOS ONE, 17(1), e0262597. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0262597

Ventola C. L. (2015). The antibiotic resistance crisis: part 1: causes and threats. P & T : a peer-reviewed journal for formulary management, 40(4), 277–283.