Name: What would the world be like without antibiotics? | BBC Ideas
Uploaded: 2022-05-15T17:36:16.000Z
Duration: 6 min 36 s
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Our entire medical system really relies on antibiotics.

We don't hear about it. But it's already here.

What would a world without antibiotics look like?

Well, I think it would look a lot like the past,

where a lot of people would die younger than they do now.

more people died of infections and their wounds,

The discovery of various classes of antibiotics in the 20th Century

So treatment of infection suddenly became very straightforward,

and it's something that we benefit a lot from today.

Antibiotics protect people during operative surgery -

Caesarean sections, replacement joints, let alone cancer treatments.

Antibiotics added, on average, 20 years life to everyone.

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."

and they said he wasn't really going to make it.

And that's when we learned that Simon had contracted

an antibiotic resistant bacterium, a superbug.

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.

which is very bad because we haven't discovered

you didn't need a prescription to get an antibiotic.

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.

The situation today is more serious than people realise.

It's actually the first real study looking at all the data -

10 million people are going to die every year

from complications with superbugs or resistant microbes.

So we really have to find alternative strategies

I sometimes call it "the post-antibiotic apocalypse" -

because animals would get ill, plants would get ill and die.

We would really be in the most dreadful mess.

As an individual, I think one of the most important things

is don't ask for antibiotics if they are not offered to you.

then make sure you finish the course of antibiotics that you're given.

We have probably found the easy-to-find antibiotics.

But that doesn't mean there are not many more to be found.

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 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.

then there would be more general pressure from society

to fund more research into targeting this problem.

and doing something about them before they become

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What would the world be like without antibiotics? | BBC Ideas

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enormous

alternative

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