How the Cold War contributed to antibiotic resistance

The Cold War was a rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union that developed after World War II. The war was “waged” on political, economic, and propaganda fronts, and the direct use of weapons against each other was mostly avoided. When not needed to save soldiers’ lives, medical research during the Cold War took on a patriotic edge as both sides competed to beat each other in a race for innovation. When talking about innovation, one might say the Cold War spawned new problems as well: the beginning of the human body’s resistance to antibiotics. At a time when the U.S. and its allies held many pharmaceutical patents unavailable to the Soviets, penicillin was one of the few unpatented “miracle drugs” that could be produced in the East as well as the West. But with access to different kinds of machinery, antibiotics produced by the U.S. and its allies varied from those produced by the Soviets. In the West, antibiotics were of the “scorched-earth” variety: once in the body, they demolished all bacteria they could find. The antibiotics were so powerful that Americans began feeding them to livestock, helping animals resist illness and grow larger before they were butchered. Antibiotics produced in the U.S.S.R., on the other hand, were made using subpar equipment and often weakened harmful bacteria rather than killing them. Today both methods have been implicated in antibiotic resistance—what happens when bacteria develop the ability to fight off drugs meant to kill them. Since bacteria are always evolving in order to survive, both antibiotic overuse (indiscriminate and unnecessary killing of bacteria, which nevertheless leaves only some highly resistant organisms alive to reproduce) and underuse (which leaves harmful bacteria alive and able to recover) lead to the development of antibiotic resistance.
And both missteps can be linked to the Cold War.