Ever since antibiotics were first developed and heralded as a miracle of modern medicine more than half a century ago, experts have warned of the dangers of their misuse. By exposing bugs to just enough medicine to encourage resistance, the fear was that we would end up encouraging germs to evade the very drugs that were designed to counter their impact.
The warnings weren’t heeded. In just a few decades, the widespread failure of our best drugs went from being a far-off possibility to a global reality. Currently, 700,000 people die every year because of drug-resistant pathogens, with those living in the poorest parts of the world being hit hardest. But this isn’t just about antibiotics. It also applies to drugs used against big global killers such as HIV and malaria.
