Just a polite exchange of cash and pills.
We are using them for everything, and it is going to cost us more than we can afford.
The power of antibiotics is easy to take for granted because most of us have grown up in a world where infections are rarely a death sentence.
For most of human history, it was the opposite.
Diseases swept through populations unchecked, changing the course of civilisations.
Archaeological records suggest plague epidemics go back at least 5,000 years.
The Old Testament speaks of rats and tumours devastating communities.
The Plague of Justinian in the 6th century may have helped bring down the Byzantine Empire.
The Black Death wiped out between a third and half of Europe’s people.
These were not just health disasters but social and economic earthquakes.
When penicillin was discovered in 1928 and began to be widely used during the Second World War, it felt as if those grim chapters had been closed for good.
Surgery became safer, childbirth less perilous, and infections that once doomed the sick to certain death could be treated in a matter of days.
But even as antibiotics began saving lives, the seeds of their undoing had already sprouted.
Before penicillin reached patients, scientists had found bacteria carrying enzymes that could destroy it.
Bacteria are survivors.
Their goal is simple: replicate, spread, and endure.
Each time they meet an antibiotic, they adapt.
The weak die, the strong survive, and their descendants inherit that armour.
Over the decades, medicine fought back by inventing new drugs and new classes of antibiotics.
But the bacteria always caught up.
Now we face “superbugs” resistant to multiple treatments.
In 2019, antimicrobial resistance (AMR) was directly responsible for 1. 27 million deaths and played a role in nearly 5 million more.
If the trend continues, the annual death toll could reach 10 million by 2050.
That is way more than the global cancer burden today.
Zimbabwe is already feeling the weight of this crisis.
Drug-resistant gonorrhoea means healthcare professionals rely almost entirely on one injectable drug, ceftriaxone.
Some urinary tract infections shrug off the standard pills.
Hospital infections sometimes leave doctors with no effective options.
Part of the problem is cultural.
A teacher with the flu will pressure a clinic for antibiotics so she can be back in class tomorrow.
A parent gives leftover pills to a coughing child “just in case. ” Health workers, short on time and under pressure to please, sometimes hand over a prescription rather than spend precious minutes explaining why that amoxilin won’t help with your influenza headache.
The other part is structural.
Antibiotics are easily bought over the counter.
In agriculture, they are fed to livestock to boost growth and prevent illness in cramped farming conditions, passing resistant bacteria to humans through meat, milk, and even water.
Losing antibiotics would roll the clock back centuries.
Caesarean sections, hip replacements, and cancer chemotherapy would all become far riskier.
Pneumonia, diarrhoea, and infected wounds could again claim young, healthy lives.
If we are to preserve antibiotics for the future, change must start now.
Pharmacies must enforce prescription rules.
Clinicians must resist patient pressure when antibiotics won’t help.
Farmers must reserve these drugs for sick animals, not for fattening stock.
And each of us must stop treating antibiotics as a cure-all for every cough, sneeze, or fever.
Antibiotics are not just another medicine.
They are the thin shield between us and a return to an age when the simplest infection could be fatal.
That shield is cracking.
If we let it break, there will be no quick fix, no backup plan—just the slow realisation that we handed the advantage back to the very enemies we thought we had defeated forever.
Kumbirai Thierry Nhamo Kumbirai Thierry Nhamo is a social justice activist, writer and blogger.
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