Until Alexander Fleming’s discovery of the antibiotic penicillin in 1928, a simple bacterial infection could prove fatal. Surgery and childbirth were extremely dangerous. An infected cut might spell amputation. As Sally Davies, the former chief medical officer for England, notes, effective antibiotics have made much of modern medicine possible. Hip replacements and transplants would be prohibitively risky without them.
Many cancer treatments would also be out: more than half of oncology patients require antibiotics. So it is extremely bad news that the world faces widespread antimicrobial resistance (AMR), a situation where bacteria, viruses, fungi and parasites stop responding to medicines.
The bugs gain the upper hand
“Before antibiotics, 43% of people died of infections in this country,” says Leah Hardy in The Daily Telegraph. Today the figure is 7%. Yet things are going in the wrong direction. Data from the UK Health Security Agency shows that “a third of all UTIs [urinary
