The Global Story: Antibiotics - A casualty of war?
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What are the historical roots of antibiotics in warfare?
They have saved countless lives and improved tens, maybe hundreds of millions more. Antimicrobial drugs have transformed the health of humanity. Some of the greatest advances in those drugs' development have been forged in wartime. But now those same wars threaten the progress that's been made.
How did the Russian invasion of Ukraine impact antibiotic resistance?
The Russian invasion of Ukraine has led to the emergence of bacteria that are severely resistant to multiple antibiotics.
A new dark age of drug resistance looms as antimicrobial drugs are prescribed in massive quantities on the battlefield and to civilian casualties. Today, the story of humanity's triumph over disease and how that is threatened by the wars we fight. With me today is Dominic Hughes, our global health correspondent. Hello, Johnny. How are you? It's just lovely to have you on the show. Thank you very much indeed. We are talking, of course, about antimicrobial resistance. Can we start with where we were before we had drugs like these, where we were, I guess, for civilians, but also where we were in wartime?
Yeah, so before antimicrobials were really discovered, life was essentially precarious. Even a relatively minor infection could prove fatal. So people say a paper cut could have killed you. Anything that could lead to an infection. So any kind of surgery, giving birth, deaths of mothers and babies were really commonplace. And treatments were pretty medieval.
What was life like before the discovery of antimicrobials?
Bloodletting was a treatment for pneumonia. Fresh air was the main treatment for tuberculosis. And for hundreds of years, mercury compounds were used to treat syphilis. But also that came along with terrible side effects. And of course, on the field of battle, any little cut could be really dangerous because battlefields are full of dirt, other people's bloods, bits of hot metal flying around. There were a lot of serious injuries and from that, deadly infections.
OK, so then along come... antimicrobials. Now, I think a fair number of people will probably be thinking, hang on, antimicrobial antibiotics, are they one and the same thing?
They're slightly different. So an antimicrobial is an agent that kills microorganisms or it stops them from growing in the first place. So antimicrobial medicines can be grouped according to the different microorganisms they act against. So for example... Antibiotics, as you mentioned, are used against bacteria. Antifungals are used against fungal infections. And they can include things like disinfectants, which are used on surfaces, or antiseptics, which are used on living tissue, for example, during surgery. And then, of course, antibiotics, which destroy microorganisms in the body.
So antibiotics are a subset of a broader group of antimicrobials. Exactly that, yeah. What about the discovery of antimicrobials and the people that made these, I guess, revolutionary discoveries?
How were antimicrobials discovered and developed?
Yeah, so, look, there's a really ancient history to the use of antimicrobials. The ancient Egyptians and the Greeks, they used moulds to treat infection, you know, more than 2,000 years ago. But in the 19th century, Louis Pasteur and Jean-Francois Joubert noticed... what they described as antagonism between bacteria. In other words, one type of bacteria stopped the action or the effect of another. Joseph Lister then used their work and he developed this into the sterilisation of surgical tools and treating wounds, which, of course, had a massive impact on survival rates during surgery. But then the crucial breakthrough was in 1928, Alexander Fleming... studying the appearance of staphylococcal colonists. A staphylococcus is a microbe that gives us boils and carbuncles.
He came back from a holiday to his lab at St Mary's Hospital in London and he found mould that was growing on a Petri dish that seemed to be preventing the bacteria that was around it from growing. They extracted it and purified it and reinjected it into animals and human beings. This mould produced pretty much a self-defence chemical that could kill the bacteria, and he named that substance penicillin.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What are the historical roots of antibiotics in warfare?
0:26–0:49
2
How did the Russian invasion of Ukraine impact antibiotic resistance?
0:49–2:12
3
What was life like before the discovery of antimicrobials?
2:12–3:50
4
How were antimicrobials discovered and developed?
3:50–6:58
5
Why is antibiotic resistance a growing concern?
6:58–9:24
6
Why aren't new antibiotics being developed?
9:24–26:55
Speakers
5 identifiedMore from Global News Podcast
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