Why Are Antibiotics And Vaccines Failing Us? [4K] | The Battle Against Superbugs | Spark

[Music] there's a way to make an entrance my destiny it was now a conspiracy of witches download veli today [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] germ warfare a phrase destined to send shivers down anyone's spine when the enemy uses biologically produced bacteria or viruses to attack an idea and a practice as old as civilization itself [Music] from the scythian warriors who dipped their arrowheads in the decomposing bodies of the fallen two millennia ago to the madman who mailed anthrax to us government officials early in our own century [Music] germ warfare diseases weaponized to attack disable even kill weapons of mass destruction of the most hideous kind but what if such agents of war came not from the enemies we know but from within our own ranks a new enemy is emerging neither superpower nor rogue nation neither terrorist group nor crazed individual no this new enemy is the natural world itself a microscopic realm of bacteria bacteria within us and not just any bacteria but the so-called superbugs [Music] these new agents of germ warfare are fighting back in response to decades of attack by us and the antibiotics that began with fleming's discovery of penicillin in the 1920s and have since become our weapons of choice so antibiotics were coined as magic bullets at the beginning of the last century and it was thought that antibiotics really solved the whole problem of infections however after the use of antibiotics it became apparent that resistance develops in the bacteria so it has turned out that we need to be really more careful in how we use antibiotics and when like frankenstein it seems we have created a monster new types of bacteria now threatening to pay us back [Music] so these superbugs have evolved through our use primarily of antibiotics and other drugs to target them to kill them to prevent infections and diseases and as a part of natural evolutionary processes these bugs are fighting for their life they're fighting for ways to overcome and survive and become resistant to these drugs and so they've adapted multiple mechanisms to evade the action a mechanism of action of these drugs and become essentially resistant to them these superbugs are trying to take our fortress by stealth creeping into our hospitals and homes deployed on every surface and in tap water covering our skin playing a waiting game invisible and potentially deadly and so we find ourselves at war [Music] working on the age-old premise that to know your enemy is to give yourself a fighting chance we must ask the obvious question just what is a superbug and what exactly are we up against [Music] superbug well a superbug most traditionally is thought of as a type of bacteria that is resistant to a full spectrum of currently used antibiotics it's a very broad term that but most understood as in terms of the antibody resistance space but we have many super bugs in terms that can cause illness and disease and they aren't always necessarily resistant to antibiotics but the most traditional understanding from the community is that it's it's bacteria resistant to antibiotics as usual our friends in the fourth estate are largely responsible for this rather sensationalist and alarmist description [Music] how i interpret a superbug uh well there there's more than one there's quite a number uh a superbug is a media media term uh in a kind of a way of summarizing for uh the general public the news audiences uh kind of the idea of a bacteria that's evolved to reject drugs used to kill it and that happens all the time but some some infections are so are very serious and they've evolved in this way and so they're called superbugs so the classic one is golden staff which is a hospital-based infection skin infection which if it gets into a wound can be quite and and if it's untreatable it can be quite serious so super work would mean those very difficult to treat pathogens pathogens they cause infections where we've got only a very small number of antibiotics that work or sometimes there's even no available antibiotic that works anymore against these infections there you have it drug resistant germs are fighting modern medicine and particularly antibiotics substances that can inhibit or even stop the growth of bacteria the medical future looks uncertain unless scientists and clinicians join forces to find new ways of conserving the arsenal of antibacterial weapons we already have and developing new strategies to defend ourselves against the superbugs in a sense we have become our own worst enemies [Music] yes i think we went wrong in the sense that we've been using antibiotics unchecked we've you know in the 50s and 60s we found this miracle drug a drug and a chemical that could eradicate and stop all bacterial infections and we use that without much thought or concern for the consequences and i think now we're starting to pay for that as a society [Music] it's always been the case that there were on planet earth bacteria that are resistant to compounds that we use today as antibiotics fungi make these so penicillin is made by a fungus and it was our invention of penicillin was in fact a discovery of the fungus that that secretes this drug the fungus uses it in warfare against the bacterium to to stave off soil bacterium so there have always been drug resistant bacteria because there are always been drugs it's just that we weren't using them as drugs previously what we see now though is a huge increase in the prevalence of the antibiotic resistant bacteria within a population if you're not throwing too much antibiotic into the environment you would expect that a really really small number of the total population of bacteria would be resistant if one of them infects you then in the olden days it was most likely going to be an antibiotic susceptible one simply because of the numbers now that we've increased the proportion of antibiotic resistant bacteria by overuse and misuse of antibiotics we have the reverse situation where it's most likely that you'll be infected by a drug resistant bacterium rather than a drug sensitive one and so we somehow have to try and work backwards in the way in which we've put this evolutionary pressure on but it has always been the case and will always be the case that there are some antibiotic resistant bacteria in the environment [Music] paradoxically it's when the medical experts we know and trust are doing their best to help but some of the greatest dangers arise [Music] i think basically we look at our skin and our skin is covered in in bacteria which people often don't necessarily realize and recognize and a lot of the bacteria just live there happily not causing any problems but when you do surgery so when you make a cut in the skin these bacteria on the skin can suddenly get into the wound and in that setting they they then instigate the infection but exactly the reason why they go from living happily and harmoniously on our skin to causing problems in the wound is something that we're really only just beginning to to understand and it's a quite a fascinating area as to why you know these bacteria behave badly in the setting of a wound they behave so badly in fact that some experts are predicting doomsday effects flowing from apparently innocuous causes if we don't manage new ways to combat antibiotic resistance the worst case scenario would be catastrophic i think people will regularly die of scratches and cuts and regular abrasions i think all of modern medicine would change going into surgery would now be a life-threatening decision do you put yourself at risk from contracting an antibiotic resistant infection that we have no mechanism to cure it's a terrifying prospect i guess the fears for for us is really that we know that a lot of surgical procedures for example joint replacement surgery have lots of benefits for patients so people who have arthritis are able to then walk around without pain and live normal happy fulfilled lives but the concern for me is if we begin to see increasing amounts of bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics perhaps those benefits from the surgery will be eroded so many of the advances that we've made in patient care particularly in surgery may be eroded by this increasing amount of drug resistant bacteria and that's probably one of the the biggest fears i have that all the wonderful advances we've made in modern modern medicine may actually be negated by the emergence of of drug resistant bacteria much rumors of our impending demise may be ill-founded there is some good news amidst all the doom and gloom especially if you live in a country like australia sometimes the tyranny of distance can be a blessing in disguise [Music] internationally we are seeing a lot of cases of very difficult to treat infections in places like south america also south africa and southeast asia however even in europe in places like greece there is the number of resistant bacteria has been increasing dramatically at the moment uh the situation in australia is not quite as serious as in other parts of the world however we are seeing more outbreaks of those difficult to treat infections and also due to the international travel as well this problem is increasing in australia overseas there are definitely seeing increasing numbers of superbugs than we are in australia as well as the superbugs are more extreme so they're they're much more resistant to kind of all currently available antibiotics and the issue is is that it's much more commonly seen in the community being in you know standard things like water fountains or puddles of water around soil in in in rivers and streams so very much embedded within the environment and the drivers of that appear to be inappropriate and misuse of antibiotics in the community we also have infections from people coming whether it be travelers who have or people who have recently traveled to then develop an infection and we know that if they've been traveling to certain countries they're at much higher risk for an antibody resistant infection or a superbug type infection and this is particularly relevant for australia because the very high rates are within our our neighbors our region whether it be parts of southern asia or southeast asia we know that there's very high rates of superbugs within the community and if any of us traveled to these parts of the world and came back we would have a very high chance of being a carrier of a superbug within our within our gut and rates of that would be in the sort of in southern asia it's probably about 70 percent of us coming back would be a potential carrier of a superbug within our within our gastrointestinal tract [Music] the other aspect around industry in countries such as in china and india these emerging markets there's a lot of there's poor regulation around waste material so from big pharmaceutical companies if you sample the water around a big industry a lot of that water will have high concentrations of antibiotics in it and that goes then into the into the soils and the streams and then that drives the environmental bacteria to become resistant to our antibiotics that we need to use for humans and creates a big problem in the community so i think that there's a lot to learn around regulation of antibiotic use both in humans and in industry and agriculture problems may also arise not because of invasions from abroad but as a result of invasive surgery so i think in the hospital setting the most common cases that we see relate to infections from foreign medical devices whether it be catheters or ventilated tubing and all these sort of processes and these interventions whether it's a catheter or in the vascular system of the urinary system or the ventilated tubing it disrupts our normal immune responses and normal defenses against invading bacteria so the most common infections that we we're seeing are things such as pneumonia so chest infections infections of the urinary tract infections intra-abdominal infections that might occur after surgery wound infections after surgery so that's the sort of most common group of infections that we're seeing [Music] the most commonly known infection is golden staff or staphylococcus aureus called golden because of its color in a petri dish it lives on our skin and is normally harmless though sometimes causing minor infections or boils but it is a big problem in hospital environments transmitted through intravenous lines catheters and surgical wounds it can also spread via physical contact respiratory droplets and food it is also becoming harder to defeat multi-resistant staphylococcus aureus or mrsa can only be treated with the antibiotic vancomycin but some strains are becoming resistant even to this last line of defense a golden staff bacterium partially resistant to vancomycin was found in japan and designated visa for vancomycin intermediate staphylococcus aureus [Music] [Music] another highly aggressive bug which is vancomycin resistant is enter a cockeye or vre identified in australia this is a bacterium that lives in our gastrointestinal and genital tract and can be a problem in post-operative patients infecting wounds and causing septicemia and endocarditis are heart infections and urinary tract infections [Music] at the moment less than one percent of this bug is resistant to vancomycin but some strains also resist other antibiotics which could make this infection unstoppable streptococcus pneumoniae spreads through respiratory droplets and can also cause meningitis and septicemia or blood poisoning it can also cause sinusitis bronchitis and ear infections in australia half the strains are resistant to one antibiotic and some 30 percent are resistant to three or four as such a common infection in people streptococcus is considered potentially more dangerous than golden staff hemophilus influenza another common infection of the ear nose and throat can cause bacterial meningitis 25 percent of strains resist most common antibiotics since the late 60s gonorrhea has become more resistant to antibiotics and now resists penicillin tetracyclines and the newest groups of antibiotics there's a no joke about not going into hospital for fear of coming out with something worse than what put you there in the first place some well-informed people aren't laughing so whenever you give an antibiotic there's always a risk that a patient might have a complication from the antibiotic itself so common things are that they can have allergic reactions so things like anaphylaxis which we're familiar with but also rashes and other impacts from the antibiotic but also we know that the antibiotics increase your risk of getting other infections and these infections are due to more resistant bacteria so they can get diarrheal infections due to organisms like clostridium difficile but also strangely enough when you're giving these antibiotics to prevent wound infections that actually increases the risk of getting wound infections to more resistant bacteria so whilst you're trying to to do good and trying to prevent harm it actually inadvertently might lead to more harm for the patient anaphylexis is an acute allergic reaction to the introduction of foreign substances into the body it's by no means the biggest cloud on the horizon so my worst fear is that we lose control and we have no longer have any antibiotics or any drugs available to treat and combat some common infections and that a lot of modern medicine is going to be essentially abolished we'll no longer be able to perform surgeries many clinical settings and clinical procedures won't be feasible due to the threat of these antibiotic infections antibiotic resistant infections that we can no longer treat like most wars this one is being fought on several fronts at once [Music] so i think you know historically these antibiotic resistant bacteria have often been thought of as just in the hospital system so that it's contracted via you know the hospitals there's a lot of drivers of antibiotic resistance that we can talk about in a hospital system but now that we're seeing antibody resistant bacteria in the community as well and the way that we're contracting these bacteria is often through our food or water source or the environment that we're that we're in we're very much interacting with with our environments with animals um our travel to different countries and the different foods and water that we are exposed to um then allows us to become carriers or colonize with these potential superbugs [Music] once again there are those who can't see the way forward so the reason that bacteria evolve resistance to anything in their environment is that bacteria are extremely good at conquering new environments so a bacterium that can live in a hospital when faced with something that would a drug that would make it die most of the population will die but there will be some bacteria that for whatever reason based on their genetics are able to resist the antibiotic and this is just this is a force of nature this is not something that you can do anything about it's the basis for the evolution of life on earth and so it's not a bad thing it's just that in this case the outcome is something dreadful an infection of a person that could well result in their death and so the evolutionary ability of a bacterium to resist an antibiotic is is not something we can stop what we can do though is work out ways in which we either slow down the rate at which evolution will occur or find some other way something you know a completely alternative way of of getting rid of the bacterium so just in the simplest possible explanation of this you can kill bacteria with a drug but you can kill bacteria with extreme heat and this is the basis for order cliving instruments before an operation you can kill bacteria with extremely caustic soaps and this is the basis for scrubbing down hospital theatres afterwards so there are other ways that bacteria can be killed and what we need to find are therapies that would be alternatives to the to the drugs in order to get around this problem of the evolution of drug resistance for some that way forward seems to lie in combining the fruits of work in the theater and in the lab so my research at monash is in prevention of infections following surgery so a lot of trial work also looking at why infections develop but then also i look at how do we use antibiotics wisely particularly in the surgical setting so there's a lot of symmetry between my clinical work and my academic work one of the first consequences of this approach might well be a radical rethink on hospitals not just how we are treated when we are in the hospital but the way we design and build hospitals in the first place yeah i think hospital design is is really crucial i think that superbugs within a hospital setting not only can be on the patients and on the devices around the patient but they can be in the hospital environment and i think our appreciation of that is only increasing and increasing over time and you know a prime example might be that older hospitals might have multi-bed bays where you have four patients in one room all sharing the same bathroom in terms of transmission that would be a very high risk from person to person as well as within the bathroom so i think in terms of new design infection prevention and control is really a high priority in new hospital design in terms of obviously having new single single bed bays for patients and dedicated bathroom facilities taken to its extreme this might even lead to a further paradox designing facilities that do away with water always consider the most fundamental requisite for healthy human life i think the other thing that's been talked about at the moment is around water and you know some of these superbugs love to live in water and it could be even the taps and the sink systems that are used in hospitals so there are now discussions about intensive care units in certain parts of the world thinking about having no sinks and no taps and a water free intensive care because they think that that's an important reservoir of superbugs that can easily be transmitted between patients and obviously new patients coming into the intensive care so i think there's a lot of new things that are being thought about around design and also i guess around the ability to decontaminate or decolonize or sterilize the environment uh and you know might be curtains and and surfaces and bed rails etc so there's a lot of research going on in terms of how best to sterilize a hospital environment and there's great exciting technology whether it's hydrogen peroxide vapor or other types of innovative methods [Music] the relative ease with which antibiotics can be obtained in some places is also of concern so for example not needing a script to need to get antibiotics that they can go straight to a pharmacist and just get antibiotics without a doctor requiring a script so that is very common in many parts around the world particularly in resource limited settings [Music] in other words we need to pay closer attention not only to our hospitals but to the wider world in which the use of antibiotics sometimes without due care and attention to the consequences has become so widespread [Music] so it's not just hospitals where we're concerned about antibiotic resistant bacteria or superbugs environmentally they're a big problem too in agriculture we use antifungal sprays on our crops and these are very similar to the antifungal drugs that we would use in a hospital to treat a patient with a fungal infection we also use antibiotics in agriculture sometimes therapeutically to treat animals to prevent infections but often not therapeutically but rather because they improve the rate of growth and so pigs for example are fed antibiotics as a result the bacteria on them and in them are antibiotic resistant and on top of that you have antibiotic residues that occur in their meat and in their feces which are then used to fertilize crops and so we're constantly overloading the environment outside of hospitals to promote the evolution of antibiotic resistant superbugs inadvertently not because we wanted to but it's a big problem you therefore have community acquired infections by superbugs as well where people just by being out in this environment can acquire infections as the basis of superbugs in the end it will be the case that a simple scratch from gardening could be something that would give you a really dreadful infection that may not respond to the antibiotics that the hospital has another part of the answer is antibiotics themselves not only the development of new ones but the strategic approach of using existing ones in previously untried combinations to produce a result whose whole is greater than the sum of its parts uh so there's several strategies that are being pursued at the bdi here at monash in that are alternatives to coming up with new drugs one of the fascinating things is the idea of using multiple either antibiotics or an antibiotic and a different drug which can be used in a combination therapy that will be more difficult for the bacterium to become resistant to it doesn't stop resistance but what it does is extend the window over which it takes evolution to finally catch up to becoming resistant to this therapy ultimately perhaps it will we will come across a combination therapy which will be impossible for bacteria to uh to become resistant to that's a great hope of course another thing that we're doing is to move right away from the idea of drug resistance so there are several people here at the bdi who are looking at ways in which you could instead treat the patient as opposed to the infection and by that i mean to stimulate their immune systems to use a drug or which may be a drug that's existing if we can work out the right sort of way of delivering it or it may be a drug which needs to be discovered but the idea here would be that if you had a compound which would promote the immune system to make it stronger than the bacterial infection or indeed the fungal infection then you have opportunities where you can treat the patient rather than treating the infection the great advantage of this strategy is that the patient won't become resistant to this drug so this is a drug which you can rely on over generations the bacteria won't know what's coming and they won't be able to respond to the fact that a super aggressive immune system is now hunting them down often seen in a skeptical modern world as enemies in their own right pharmaceutical companies have traditionally driven the development of antibiotics and their deployment on the medical battlefield so i think that historically um there was a lot of interest in antibiotics but from a business sort of model from for industry and big pharma antibiotics were a really challenging area because you develop an antibiotic all the doctors want to try and prevent use of that handy body because they want to save it because it's very you know precious in terms of its utility and then by the time that the patent is up then they've just started to use it and you know from a business financial model it appears historically that's been a problem things now the governments around the world have realized this and now there's a lot of incentives and ideas to try and improve the kind of business model around antibiotic drug discovery and development and so now there's still a few big pharma companies who are showing a great initiative in this space um and uh and are still producing new antibiotics and i think the pipeline you know over the last as you know last two to three years is looking quite exciting in this space and it's already coming into the clinical interface um so i think that it's really a responsibility both of big pharma as well as public and government to work together to try and incentivize the development of new antibiotics monash university in melbourne australia is on the cutting edge of this research with a multifaceted approach to the problem my work involves studies in a laboratory where we look at the effects of different antibiotic treatments on difficult to treat bacteria and also it involves mathematical modelling in order to describe the relationship between antibiotic concentrations and effects so we get the bacteria from patients from the hospital so that's patients with difficult to treat infections and then in the lab we can expose the bacteria to all sorts of different antibiotic treatments including high doses or different ways of delivering the antibiotic such as a short infusion or a continuous infusion of a whole day we will also test antibiotic combinations and in this way we can simulate what happens in the human body and find out how these different types of treatments work the overarching goal of our research group is really to beat and tackle these superbugs and the way we do this is really a multi-pronged approach i have a research group that starts off at the bench to understand how these superbugs what are the mechanisms that they use to cause disease and if we can understand those mechanisms then we can look for novel therapeutics that can prevent those kind of mechanisms and disease the second is then to move into the sort of area of rapid diagnostics how can we quickly identify that we're dealing with a superbug or not and that's really crucial to target our our and and rapid treatment of these superbugs and outcomes for patients and then i guess the next is about best use of antibiotics how do we use our antibiotics our currently available antibiotics in the best possible way to prevent the emergence of resistance and to best kill off superbugs and i guess more broadly then is about transmission how do we prevent transmission from environment to patient from patient to patient from healthcare worker to patient and that is both within the hospital setting as well as out in the community and we're really reaching out into the community particularly in nursing homes to understand the role of nursing homes as a reservoir of superbugs sometimes too cutting edge research can turn into a different kettle of fish almost literally [Music] so we use zebrafish in the laboratory environment because they are a great model system to study how the host immune response responds to superbugs we're able to use uh the the fish to uh image in real time how the white cells the main immune cells attack superbugs in real time with you know real infections whether it be in the bloodstream of the zebrafish or in the soft tissue of the zebrafish and we can do this and we can really understand processes of both how the host and the pathogen are interacting and by doing this we've been able to identify novel pathways in the bacteria that we can potentially block to augment or to facilitate an increase in immune response so that the neutrophils or the white cells can kill off the superbugs more rapidly so zebrafish have the real advantage of particularly in the early phase which is called the embryos they're transparent so we can do microscopy imaging of the zebrafish during an infection and you know in real time the other thing is that they're we can manipulate the genetics of the fish so we can actually have fluorescent white cells so if we have red fluorescent neutrophils or white cells of the fish we have green fluorescent superbug we can actually look in real time how they interact and do very detailed imaging and microscopy sometimes it's not a matter of finding something new but of taking a fresh look at something once known but perhaps forgotten for example there is an antibiotic that fell out of favor many decades ago polymix in e or colistin first developed in japan and used clinically in 1959 it was known to be toxic to patients kidneys however it is an antibiotic of last resort for many types of resistant gram-negative bacilli we came to work on calliston because it was starting to be used increasingly and in recognition of the fact that it was introduced back in the 1950s um it came onto the market at a time when there were not many studies done during development of a drug to understand how to best use the drug to understand its pharmacology and so forth and so basically doctors when they needed to start using colistin again were basically shooting in the dark they didn't really know which doses to use for particular patients so the work that we've been doing is basically uh developing essentially the large body of evidence for how to best use colistin that's the work that we've been doing last but not least what if we were able to turn the tables on the superbugs and do what they have been doing to us attacking them from within another area of renewed interest is in bacteriophage an almost forgotten field of research there are some pockets of continued use of this little known treatment which uses the viruses that live within bacteria to consume them researchers gathering momentum on phages and the lytic proteins which can cause dissolution of bacterial cells so a bacteriophage is a tiny tiny virus and it's a specialized virus that only infects and kills bacterial cells so it doesn't recognize or infect human cells it won't affect the general microbiota in fact it's highly specific for a specific bacterial strain and it will bind infect and replicate within that bacterial cell and then it will eventually burst and kill that bacterial cell and release more phage back into the surrounding environment [Music] once again it seems the use of bacteriophages is a case of relearning what we already knew and turning it to our advantage phages were discovered in 1917 by a doctor called felix de harel and he was a french canadian microbiologist and he noticed these plaques or zones of clearing on his bacterial plate and he did a lot of study and investigation on them and proposed them as a virus that infects and predates on bacterial cells that they've they've been around or known about by humans for over 100 years in fact we discovered phages before we discovered antibiotics and they were used as an antimicrobial agent for 20 30 years before alexander fleming discovered and used penicillin they stopped using phages because they're a biological entity they're a biological virus and being part of biology they're extremely complex and they're extremely diverse and so unlike antibiotics which are defined chemicals that we know their structure and the mechanism of action phages are very different they can be extremely unique extremely diverse and that makes understanding them and applying them much much more complex and so it's taken us a long time to understand their biology and to be able to use them in a therapeutic setting while war has often opposed east and west the war on superbugs makes allies of enemies in the common cause so eastern europe never really gave up on phage therapy a lot of labs and institutes in poland and georgia and russia continued on with phage not only research but also therapy and while the west was caught up in antibiotics and their use is a miracle drug a lot of eastern europe still used phages as a way to treat and combat bacterial disease and still to this day one of the biggest phage therapy clinics in the world the laava institute is based in the republic of georgia and eastern europe there's more phages than any other organism on the planet and so they're everywhere but the problem with phages is that they're highly specific they'll only typically recognize a certain type of bacteria so in order to use them therapeutically you need to isolate and identify the phage to be able to use it to treat and target a specific bacterial infection so what the clinics and research institutes in eastern europe have done have stockpiled huge collections of phages huge libraries of phages that have antimicrobial activity against a broad range of different pathogens and they've had this experience in these libraries for decades now and they're now using these to treat difficult to to combat bacterial infections phages new drugs clever hospitals a responsible approach to antibiotics and their use all well and good but what if none of the above should work where would that leave humanity in its war against the superbugs what i think is a real tragedy so the ultimate irony is that as we get better and better at defeating cancer through the research investment that's been made and the clever therapies that have come about more and more of the people who die as a result of cancer will die from infections they'll die from infections because of operations they have to have to save their lives from the tumor or from the other cancers and they will end up with a post-operative infection which is multi-drug resistant which the doctors can't do anything about and that will be their fate particularly in the case where the person may have had to undergo chemotherapy or radiotherapy which impacts their immune system and i just think this is such a dreadful dilemma that we really have to up our game in terms of what we do looking into research on infections on microbes on bacteria on funky to make sure that this terrible tragedy doesn't eventuate in any battle you can run or you can stand and fight how are we reacting to the superbugs are we aware and should we be afraid i am i'm frightened for the future [Music] i firmly believe that we can do something about this i think this is a dreadful and huge problem that can be turned around and so my fear for the future is that we won't act hard enough and fast enough to actually turn the problem around if you think about your kids and your grandkids it is something that you get scared about it's not the only problem for the future that's a dreadful one but it really is one of the big ones and we do have to act more and more quickly if we're going to see a solution soon soon enough the fears are that these bacteria are extremely smart and intelligent they've shown an amazing track record to be able to get around our new antibiotics all the time and i guess our fear is that if we let our guard down or if we take this for granted in some way or take our antibiotics for grant in some way that these bacteria will push on and really will become resistant to everything that we have in a highly prevalent manner and cause very life-threatening and serious infections so i think that's a real driver for humans and innovation is to stay one step ahead of these very very very smart superbugs [Music]

Channel: Spark

Views: 65,465

Keywords: Antibiotic crisis solutions, Antibiotic prescriptions, Antibiotics, Bacteria, Biochemistry, Biological threats, Evolutionary biology, Healthcare, Healthcare technology, Immune system, Medical ethics, Medical innovation, Microbes, Microbial evolution, Microbial genetics, Public health policies, Resistance genes, Spark, Technology, Vaccines, World health

Id: OfCNfmvWEio

Length: 48min 28sec (2908 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 28 2022