Name: 【TED】Maryn McKenna: What do we do when antibiotics don’t work any more?
Uploaded: 2015-11-26T04:42:33.000Z
Duration: 17 min
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

He was a young husband and a semi-pro basketball player

Family history says he loved being a fireman,

To make himself useful that day, he started polishing all the brass,

the railings on the fire truck, the fittings on the walls,

A few days later, his shoulder started to hurt.

but nothing she did made a difference, and when they got the local doctor in,

They flagged down a cab and took him to the hospital.

The nurses there recognized right away that he had an infection,

what at the time they would have called "blood poisoning,"

There was nothing they could do because the things we use now

The first test of penicillin, the first antibiotic,

People who got infections either recovered, if they were lucky,

He was in the hospital for a week, shaking with chills,

sinking into a coma as his organs failed.

that the people from his firehouse lined up to give him transfusions

hoping to dilute the infection surging through his blood.

most people died the way my great uncle died.

Most people didn't die of cancer or heart disease,

the lifestyle diseases that afflict us in the West today.

They didn't die of those diseases because they didn't live long enough

crushed in one of the new factories of the Industrial Revolution --

which finished what those injuries began.

All of that changed when antibiotics arrived.

Suddenly, infections that had been a death sentence

became something you recovered from in days.

and ever since, we have been living inside the golden epoch of the miracle drugs.

My great uncle died in the last days of the pre-antibiotic era.

We stand today on the threshold of the post-antibiotic era,

in the earliest days of a time when simple infections

such as the one Joe had will kill people once again.

People are dying of infections again because of a phenomenon

Bacteria compete against each other for resources, for food,

by manufacturing lethal compounds that they direct against each other.

evolve defenses against that chemical attack.

we took those compounds into the lab and made our own versions of them,

and bacteria responded to our attack the way they always had.

and widespread penicillin resistance arrived by 1945.

Daptomycin, one of the most recent drugs, in 2003,

and resistance to it just a year later in 2004.

For 70 years, we played a game of leapfrog --

and then another drug, and then resistance again --

Bacteria develop resistance so quickly that pharmaceutical companies

have decided making antibiotics is not in their best interest,

so there are infections moving across the world

for which, out of the more than 100 antibiotics

In 2000, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the CDC,

of an infection resistant to all but two drugs.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

【TED】Maryn McKenna: What do we do when antibiotics don’t work any more?

people

year

bacteria

british