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The post-antibiotic era: what medicine looks like when the drugs stop working
12 min
Antibiotic resistance is rising while the pipeline of new drugs runs thin. A serious look at how routine surgery, childbirth, and infection care change if our most basic drugs fail.
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Show notes
Antibiotics function as an external immune system for chemotherapy patients and organ transplant recipients.
Eighty-three percent of Indian endoscopy patients were found to carry multidrug-resistant organisms.
Bacteria use molecular pumps and enzymes to eject or dismantle life-saving antibiotic drugs.
Antimicrobial resistance causes one million two hundred seventy thousand global deaths every year.
Agricultural misuse of sub-therapeutic doses in livestock creates evolutionary training grounds for bacteria.
Bacteriophages act as precision instruments that evolve alongside bacteria to neutralize resistance mechanisms.
In this episode
- 1Intro1 min
- 2The Fragile Shield of Modern Surgery3 min
- 3The Evolutionary Arms Race3 min
- 4The Current Toll and the 'Superbug' Reality2 min
- 5Beyond the Pill: Phages and Host Therapy2 min
- 6Outro1 min
Sources
- Antibiotic Apocalypse - Transcript
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- What a Post-Antibiotic Era Could Mean for Modern Medicine and Global Health
- The End of Simple Medicine: Antibiotic Resistance and the Collapse of a Modern Miracle - EP 8 - CollapseCast
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- A Prescription for Pestilence: The Global Spread of Antimicrobial Resistance
- ‘The antibiotic pipeline is running dangerously dry’: An Expert Explains threat of antimicrobial resistance | Explained News - The Indian Express
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- Current global challenges and innovative strategies to combat antimicrobial resistance | Discover Public Health | Springer Nature Link
- The Global Burden of Multidrug-Resistant Bacteria
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