INTRODUCTION
The fundamental question about antibiotic resistant diseases (ABRD) is where and
when did they originate? The answer lies in that huge panorama of microbiomes that
are the basis for life on Earth. This vast landscape, which includes all aquatic and
terrestrial environments, has its roots in ancient bacterial communities that can be
traced back billions of years. Many now lost microbes once inhabited ancient bacterial
microbiomes in all trophic levels of the biosphere. Their descendents continue to live in
all the microbiomes that characterize the biosphere, one of hundreds of millions of
which is the human gut. Human intestines are characterized by as many as 100 trillion
microorganisms belonging to 200 or more microbial species. Thousands of years before
the development of industrial agriculture and before the evolution of hospital-acquired
infections, ancient environmental reservoirs of resistance characterized all
microbiomes, including the microbial communities characterizing the human gut
(stomach and intestines), skin, the vaginal environment, the lungs and nose and the oral
environment of the mouth. A number of annotated citations in this text highlight these
ancient reservoirs of bacteria and the change in the genes that evolved to counteract or
control other bacterial infections.
A whole new world of manmade environmental chemicals now characterizes our
hemispheric water supply, including all biomes whose key constituent is water. Only a
small percentage of the total volume of these effluents can be biodegraded or
bioconverted to other metabolites by the creative diversity of our many microbial
communities. The ecological, as well as the social, political, and economic context of
our biosphere in crisis can now be summarized by an historical observation: (x) the
growing impact of “antibiotic winter.” The rapidly changing environments of our
contemporary ____ highlighted by the CDC report
on ABRD are part of a much larger worldwide panorama of viral infections such as
HIV, malaria, cholera, influenza, and rabies. Many pandemics have been halted by the
vaccines produced by the world medical community. Polio, smallpox, and head
the list of dangerous plagues that are now medical history. Ebola has recently been
controlled. The impact of SARS has been curtailed. The Zika outbreak is now the
object of a mass research effort to find a vaccine. Other emerging viral infections pose a
future threat of worldwide pandemics. New variations of avian and livestock influenza,
SARS, the Marburg virus, and other infections are now much more susceptible to
hemispheric transport, sometimes associated with the increasing frequency of invasive
species movement. The rapid spread of Lyme disease is an example of a viral infection
that, unlike bacterial infections, cannot be treated with antibiotics, even though they use
them a lot. All bacterial and viral infections are occurring in the context of a rapidly