What would a world without antibiotics be like?
What would a world without antibiotics be like?
EVERLY MACARIO: Our entire medical system really relies on antibiotics. DR ANNA BARNARD; Wellcome Trust, Sir Henry Dale Research Fellow, Imperial College London: This would be the biggest health crisis that we've experienced this century. MANUEL RAZO-MEJIA; Evolutionary Biologist, Schmidt Science Fellow, Stanford University: We don't hear about it. But it's already here. DAME SALLY DAVIES; UK Special Envoy on Antimicrobial Resistance: Nobody is safe, until we're all safe. DR ANNA BARNARD: What would a world without antibiotics look like? CAPTION: A WORLD WITHOUT ANTIBIOTICS DR ANNA BARNARD: Well, I think it would look a lot like the past, where a lot of people would die younger than they do now. DAME SALLY DAVIES: Just think about war more people died of infections and their wounds, than died actually on the battlefield. CAPTION: BEFORE ANTIBIOTICS, YOU COULD DIE FROM SOMETHING AS SIMPLE AS A CUT ON YOUR FINGER. DR ANNA BARNARD: The discovery of various classes of antibiotics in the 20th Century had a profound impact on health care. So treatment of infection suddenly became very straightforward, and it's something that we benefit a lot from today. DAME SALLY DAVIES: Antibiotics protect people during operative surgery Caesarean sections, replacement joints, let alone cancer treatments. Antibiotics added, on average, 20 years life to everyone. CAPTION: BUT WILL THEY CONTINUE TO DO SO? EVERLY MACARIO AND HER FAMILY LIVE IN CHICAGO. ONE MORNING, HER 18-MONTH-OLD SON SIMON WOKE UP WITH A FEVER. THINGS QUICKLY ESCALATED. EVERLY MACARIO: We went to the hospital, the emergency room. They said they gave him a broad spectrum antibiotic. And then they took me to another room and they're like, "Your son has an infection. We don't know the source." We were in the ICU with like 10 doctors, and they said he wasn't really going to make it. At that point, I knew that he was dead. I could feel it. And that's when we learned that Simon had contracted an antibiotic resistant bacterium, a superbug. And I had never heard of any of this. CAPTION: RESISTANCE TO ANTIBIOTICS IS SOMETIMES CALLED "THE SILENT PANDEMIC". WHEN THE FIRST ANTIBIOTIC WAS DISCOVEREDIT WAS HAILED AS A WONDER DRUG. DAME SALLY DAVIES: Alexander Fleming's discovery of penicillin was immense. Noticing that in a petri dish where bacteria were growing, there were white areas where the bacteria were not growing. And he realised that something had happened. He looked and found the fungus, penicillin our first effective antibiotic that saved masses of lives. Most antibiotics come from soil and fungi. CAPTION: ANTIBIOTICS KILL BACTERIA, BUT BACTERIA CONSTANTLY EVOLVE TO STAY ALIVE. SO THE MORE WE TAKE ANTIBIOTICS, THE MORE THEY DEVELOP RESISTANCE AND THE LESS EFFECTIVE THE DRUGS BECOME. MANUEL RAZO-MEJIA: When I expose bacteria to antibiotics, they're going to become resistant, which is very bad because we haven't discovered a new antibiotic in the last 30 years. Growing up back in Mexico, you didn't need a prescription to get an antibiotic. You had a little bit of a sore throat, you go to the pharmacy and get an antibiotic. And that only gives more and more chances to these bugs to acquire mutations to become resistant. CAPTION: FLEMING HIMSELF WARNED OF THISIN HIS NOBEL PRIZE ACCEPTANCE SPEECH IN 1945. ALEXANDER FLEMING: "THE TIME MAY COME WHEN PENICILLIN CAN BE BOUGHT BY ANYONE IN THE SHOPS. THEN THERE IS THE DANGER THAT THE IGNORANT MAN MAY EASILY UNDERDOSE HIMSELF, AND BY EXPOSING HIS MICROBES TO THE NON-LETHAL QUANTITIES OF THE DRUG, MAKE THEM RESISTANT." DR ANNA BARNARD: The situation today is more serious than people realise. CAPTION: A RECENT STUDY IN THE LANCET MEDICAL JOURNAL REVEALED THE SCALE OF THE PROBLEM. DAME SALLY DAVIES: It's actually the first real study looking at all the data 494 million patient records to model what is happening. CAPTION: IT ESTIMATED 1.27 MILLION PEOPLE DIED IN 2019 AS A DIRECT RESULT OF ANTIBIOTIC RESISTANCE AND IT PLAYED A ROLE IN ALMOST 5 MILLION DEATHS. MAUEL RAZO-MEJIA: It is predicted that by 2050, 10 million people are going to die every year from complications with superbugs or resistant microbes. So we really have to find alternative strategies to fight against these bugs. DAME SALLY DAVIES: A world without antibiotics I sometimes call it "the post-antibiotic apocalypse" would impact on our food chain too, because animals would get ill, plants would get ill and die. We would really be in the most dreadful mess. CAPTION: SO WHAT CAN BE DONE TO STOP THIS? DR ANNA BARNARD: As an individual, I think one of the most important things is don't ask for antibiotics if they are not offered to you. If you are prescribed antibiotics, then make sure you finish the course of antibiotics that you're given. Because if you don't finish the course, even if you're feeling better, there might be some residual infection that could become resistant. DAME SALLY DAVIES: We have probably found the easy-to-find antibiotics. But that doesn't mean there are not many more to be found. DR ANNA BARNARD: If we keep recycling the same old treatments, then the problem is just going to exacerbate. One of the main bottlenecks with antibiotic research is that the easiest thing to do is to look at the structures of existing antibiotics, and modify those slightly to try to overcome the resistance. It's much more challenging to find a completely new class of antibiotics. So we have to fund quite widely in order to be able to identify those strategies that are going to work best. I think if there were more awareness then there would be more general pressure from society on governments and on companies to fund more research into targeting this problem. We should be anticipating problems, and doing something about them before they become enormous global crises.