Global irrational antibiotics/antibacterial drugs use: A current and future health and environmental consequences

Antibacterial/antibiotic drugs have tremendously improved the health of humans and animals since the antibiotic golden age up to date. Currently the emergence of antibiotic/antibacterial resistance due to irrational drug use in medical and veterinary practice, food industries, agriculture and in communities is posing a global health problem. Most of the unused drugs, drug metabolites and residues enter the environment by various means thus affecting the natural ecosystems. They select the antibiotic-resistant mutants and facilitate the acquisition of antibiotic resistance determinants by the genetransfer elements that are increasingly spreading among the environmental microbiota. They destroy the susceptible microbiota such as the Cyanobacteria that is responsible for production of third of the total free oxygen and carbon dioxide in the environment. They affect the natural metabolic processes of the microbiota by altering the structure and the physiology of all the microorganisms in the environment and thus affecting the maintenance of the global activity of the microbiosphere. Antibiotic/antibacterial resistance increases the cost of treatment, prolonged hospitalization due to resistant bacterial infections in addition to some individuals getting exposed to second and third-line drugs that are highly toxic thus increasing the adverse drug reactions in humans and economic loss in animals.