One day you wake up with a sore throat and a sniffling nose. You go to the doctor's office and the nurse swabs your throat. That day you receive a call that you have a sore throat and the doctor prescribes a dose of antibiotics. A week later, the sore throat is completely gone and you are back to normal. Many people have taken antibiotics, but don't necessarily know what they are, how often they consume them, or how risky their use is in general. According to Merriam-Webster, an antibiotic is defined as “a manufactured or semisynthetic substance derived from a microorganism and capable in dilute solution of inhibiting or killing another microorganism.” Today we use antibiotics in almost everything. We use them to treat our pets, we inject them into our livestock, and we've even developed ways to get antibiotics into the food we grow and eat. Our society is now heavily dependent on the effectiveness of antibiotics in everyday life. Without them, a simple surgery becomes a deadly risk, the smallest cut becomes a potentially fatal wound, and any deadly disease can spread like wildfire. However, the various benefits of using antibiotics in livestock, crops, and treating human diseases do not outweigh the risks associated with their massive overuse occurring today, and the most important risk is antibiotic resistance. Antibiotics were only recently developed, but they have changed the world since their discovery. In 1928, a man named Alexander Fleming stumbled upon a mold spore that appeared to kill the bacterial strains he was growing in Petri dishes. He decided to investigate further and eventually developed the first antibiotic, penicillin. To his amazement, this penicillin could kill several... half of the paper... patients. Prioritize the recipient base so that antibiotics are used as a last resort. This could be made possible by public use of good disease prevention skills, such as washing hands and keeping clothes clean (Davies). These steps and others could greatly reduce or even solve the entire problem of antibiotic resistance and allow us to continue using antibiotics responsibly. Because regardless of resistance, antibiotics save lives every day. Overuse of antibiotics in livestock, risky use of GMOs, and overprescribing of antibiotics at a clinical level in humans are risks that truly outweigh any benefits of continued use at the current rate. These are easily solvable problems and we should do everything in our power to do so. The evidence is there, the resistance is increasing. We have to stop it before it's really too late.