They've been predicting this for years and it looks like it's finally come to pass.

In our human hubris, we think we can outsmart or defeat Mother Nature. It's things like this that remind us how our pitiful efforts to control the natural world usually go for naught.

Daily Mail:

A high-ranking official with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has declared in an interview with PBS that the age of antibiotics has come to an end.

'For a long time, there have been newspaper stories and covers of magazines that talked about "The end of antibiotics, question mark?"' said Dr Arjun Srinivasan. 'Well, now I would say you can change the title to "The end of antibiotics, period."'

The associate director of the CDC sat down with Frontline over the summer for a lengthy interview about the growing problem of antibacterial resistance.

Srinivasan, who is also featured in a Frontline report called 'Hunting the Nightmare Bacteria,' which aired Tuesday, said that both humans and livestock have been overmedicated to such a degree that bacteria are now resistant to antibiotics.

'We're in the post-antibiotic era,' he said. 'There are patients for whom we have no therapy, and we are literally in a position of having a patient in a bed who has an infection, something that five years ago even we could have treated, but now we can't.'.

Dr Srinivasan offered an example of this notion, citing the recent case of three Tampa Bay Buccaneers players who made headlines after reportedly contracting potentially deadly MRSA infections, which until recently were largely restricted to hospitals.

About 10 years ago, however, the CDC official began seeing outbreaks of different kinds of MRSA infections in schools and gyms.

'In hospitals, when you see MRSA infections, you oftentimes see that in patients who have a catheter in their blood, and that creates an opportunity for MRSA to get into their bloodstream,' he said.

'In the community, it was causing a very different type of infection. It was causing a lot of very, very serious and painful infections of the skin, which was completely different from what we would see in health care.'

I remember in the early 90's being prescribed some antibiotics and the doctor telling me to finish taking the pills even after I feel better. He said at the time that because so many people are not taking the drugs correctly, that there will come a day when most bugs are resistant to antibiotics - and we'll only have ourselves to blame.

If we have, indeed, reached the end of an era with antibiotics, even the smallest cuts could mean death. I don't think we're anywhere near that point, but that's certainly in our future unless Big Pharma can bail us out by developing drugs that can counter the resistant strains of viruses.