A father stands by, anxiously watching as his son fights for his life in the hospital’s Intensive Care Unit. What had begun as a small infected burn on his son’s elbow from working on his truck had, in a single day, left him unable to walk. As his heart raced — 160 beats a minute — his blood pressure dropped, and dropped some more.

Without a miracle, he would soon die.

His only hope: the antibiotic doctors administered as a means of bringing the raging infection under control.

Six days later, the son is up and leaving the hospital, tired but none the worse for the experience. A few days later, he is back at work.

This scene took place in a small-town hospital in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, but it is repeated often in hospitals and clinics around the nation. Every day — every minute — antibiotics are called upon to save lives.

Antibiotics are, in every sense of the word, miracle drugs. Beginning with the development of penicillin in 1928, doctors have been able to cure bacterial infections that otherwise would have killed their patients.

But antibiotics are complex. How they work is often misunderstood, and on too many occasions they are misused or overused in humans — and in livestock.

The unfortunate result is bacterial resistance to some antibiotics, rendering them ineffective. In other words, people and animals can die because of how these precious drugs have been misused. According to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, drug-resistant bacteria kill 35,000 people — and even more animals — each year.

But the story of antibiotics resistance is not linear. It is not a simple matter of stricter regulations for their use or banning certain types of antibiotics in certain uses.

“If you understand antibiotic resistance, then it hasn’t been explained to you adequately,” Mike Apley, a veterinarian and professor at Kansas State University’s College of Veterinary Medicine, told reporter Sierra Dawn McClain. She produced a special report that appeared in last week’s editions of the Capital Press. It is available at www.capitalpress.com.

Simply put, antibiotics kill bacteria, which can infect and kill people. But how the bacteria respond to an antibiotic needs to be understood as well.

For example, nearly everyone has been prescribed an antibiotic with the admonition from the doctor to “take all of the pills.” This is because as the bacteria are attacked they fight back by rapidly multiplying. If antibiotics are stopped before the bacteria have been overcome, they can roar back — and that antibiotic will no longer work.

That’s when people, and animals, die. And ultimately, it’s when those who need antibiotics find themselves without those tools to fight infections.

We’re not saying the use of antibiotics is bad. It’s not. Even some “antibiotic-free” livestock operations find it necessary to use the drugs to save the life of an animal that has an infection. That animal then goes into a different marketing channel.

But it’s incumbent upon everyone who uses antibiotics to understand what they are doing and why. Not all antibiotics used on animals are effective on humans, and vice versa. However, the those that are effective on both need to be handled with special care. This year, the FDA issued new guidelines for the use of those antibiotics.

Farmers and ranchers need to work closely with their veterinarians to make sure they are following those guidelines.

What’s at stake — the effectiveness of antibiotics — is too important for everyone.