Albert Alexander was admitted to the hospital in a very bad state..
His face was covered with abscesses ..
and his eyes were oozing so much  puss..
that they had to remove it completely.
Doctros knew that reaching such a late stage of infection..
is a cetain death scentence.
There was nothing that available medicine in 1940..
can do to help.
Surprisingly this it that it all started with something so simple..
If it happened today, it would not be given a second thought..
A thorn of a rose scratched his face while in his garden.
since his condition was terminal..
This made him the perfect candidate for the first ever trial of penicillin..
The first human compatible Antibiotic
Penicillin helped "Albert" get better day by day..
It looked as if he was on his way to recovery.
But eventually Albert died since there was not enough penicillin to continue treatment ..
But penicillin proved to be an effective drug..
And this was a pivotal point in the history of humanity.
And since then. Antibiotics have been fighting bacteria on our behalf.
I'm "Marwan Gharib"..
and I'd like to tell you about what will happen if antibiotics lost this fight.
let's kick it of by about what an Antibiotic is.
Were are surrounded by bacteria , Fungi and microbes from all directions..
at any given time our bodies are covered with billions of them..
on the skin, in the mouth, in the air that we breath..
on the food we eat..
Even inside of us we are filled with bacteria
living with us, and by us
We have 10 times as much bacteria as we have human cells!
and that is not necessarily a bad thing..
since most bacteria are simply harmless..
they can even be beneficial to some of our bodily functions..
But there are sill the bad one out there..
our first line of defense against it is our skin..
It simply denies bacteria from entering inside the body..
but if it was  to enter through breathing for instance..
or through contaminated food or an open wound..
The only defense available is the immunity system..
If the immunity system fails at stopping it..
then this is a big dilemma..
Depending on you luck, Either the immunity pulls itself together..
and fends of the infectionon it's own..
or it can do nothing and the bacteria continues to damage the body..
Without anything stopping it.
Microbes around us are very diverse..
and they share the same living space..
They compete for food and resources..
and are in a constant state of war..
a chemical war of a microscopic scale..
Microbes shoot each other with toxic chemicals..
and as always.. Survival is for the fittest
This war was key for the discovery of antibiotics..
Which, by the way, discovered with a stroke of luck.
Alexander flemming  was a biologist..
returning to his lab after a month long vacation..
an unorganized fella, he didn't throw left overs from an old experiment..
before leaving..
amongst them,a petri dish full of a bacteria called "Staphylococcus"..
It's a kind of bacteria that's very harmful to humans..
by causing wounds to be infected..
He notice an area covered in mold..
and around this mold the is no trace of bacteria.
The mold secreted a chemical that killed off the bacteria around it.
This mold is actually a fungus called "penicillum Notatum"..
and the juice it produced was the first discovered antibiotic..
and it was called "penicillin" after the fungus producing it.
This was in 1928..
and since then.. There were many trials to produce "penicillin" in larger amounts..
most of them failed.
It was only 11 years later ..
when two doctors from Oxford university..
"Howard Florey" and "Earnst Chain"..
were able to transform a mere lab experiment..
to be the miracle drug we know today.
They were finally able to produce them in enough amounts..
That enabled experiments on animals and humans.
Signaling the sart of "The Entibiotic Era".
and just like that, A whole slew of dangerous diseases..
like TB , Pneumonia & meningitis, Are now easily treated..
getting wounded and developing an infection is not that terrifying anymore..
surgeries like organ transplants are now an option..
especially that we can finally suppress the body's immunity..
so it doesn't attack the freshly implanted organ..
while not fearing for the now immuno-compromised patient..
since antibiotics can protect him..
Same goes for cancer treatments..
Chemotherapy and radiation weakens immunity as well..
50% of all deaths was caused by bacteria..
Today, it dropped to a mere 3%..
In 1920 the average life expectancy in the US was 56 years..
Today , it shot up to 80 years.
Discovery of antibiotics did not only revolutionize medicine..
It also affected the way we live our every day lives..
Just imagine if were still at an era..
when one out of every ten injured people contracted a deadly infection..
will live  in the same way we do now?!
We'll think a thousand time before allowing our kids - who already have weak immunity- to play on the street..
We'll think a thousand time before doing things that risks injury..
Like running on the stairs..
or riding a bike, or  a million other thing ..
The we do daily without a second thought..
Antibiotics are one of these things that can be very easily taken for granted..
because we didn't try living without it.
Since antibiotics were hailed as a miracle drug..
Major pharmaceutical companies competed to produce new stronger antibiotics..
the 50's and the 60's are heralded as " The Golden age of antibiotics."
But nature never settles..
Bacteria reproduce very rapidly..
Able to double in numbers every 20 minutes..
and with every new generation, there's the possibility of a single one's DNA mutating..
giving it the ability to resist a certain class of antibiotics..
It can for example acquire thicker cell walls..
That Antibiotic particles can no longer penetrate..
Or even giving it the ability to attack the Antibiotic..
and disable it..
or even being able to kick the antibiotic particles out of the cell before it is able to do anything..
Bacteria are able to transfer this mutated DNA to each other..
so only a single drug resistant bacteria  is needed..
to produce a complete strain with these same defensive traits.
This is a video of an experiment done last year ..
to showcase how bacteria can adapt to the presence of antibiotics..
This rectangle is divided into 8 regions with different concentrations of antibiotics..
going from outside towards the center, outside will have no antibiotics..
Next region has antibiotic..
Next region has 10 times that concentration..
next is 100 times more..
and finally 1000 times more in the center..
the experiment starts with allowing E.coli bacteria to grow..
In the areas that has no antibiotic..
as expected the bacteria spread as there is nothing to impede it..
and stopped at the border of the area having the antibiotic..
so far so good..
but then a single bacteria mutated..
and was able to resist the antibiotic..
and very rapidly the antibiotic area became overrun with bacteria..
The same happened to the next zone..
and the next.. until the full rectangle is completely filled with bacteria..
The scary part is the bacteria spread ,evolved and beat the antibiotic in only 11 days!
so we've been playing cat and mouse with bacteria.
ever since we developed anitbiotics..
Penicillin was developed in 1943..
resistance to it appeared in 1965..
Tetracycline was developed in 1950..
resistance to it appeared in 1959..
Erythromycin was developed in 1953..
resistance to it appeared in 1968..
and so on..
every time we develop a new drug. strains of bacteria resistant to it appears.
The  issue is we haven't developed any new classes of antibiotics since the 70s
Almost all new drugs today are an altercation of the types developed
During the 50s and 60s.
bacterial evolution and development of resistance is inevitable..
The question is not whether bacteria will resist..
it's a question of when.
and us as humans are accelerating this resistance..
every time we use an antibiotic ..
new strains of bacteria are subjected to it..
so every time new bacteria are needlessly exposed to antibiotics..
it increases the chance of this bacteria developing or showing new forms of resistance..
the saying " play your cards close to your chest" applies when dealing with antibiotics..
If we want them to remain effective, we must only use them when needed.
But we abuse antibiotics and take the for no good reason..
we deal with it as a commodity like "Asprin" or "Panadol"..
if we have a bit of flu,we take antibiotics..
and this really accelerates emergence of resistance.
Even worse ; 80% of antibiotic consumption happens at animal farms..
they use it to make the animals grow fatter so yields are higher..
and since farms of cows and chicken etc. are over populated..
and these animals live in filthy conditions..
the main use of antibiotics is to stop diseases from spreading amongst the livestock..
so a farmer can stuff in even more animals  in a tight space.
And when it comes to pharmaceutical companies..
producing antibiotics lucrative anymore.
They invest a ton of money on R&D and eventually..
the drug produced is used for short periods..
especially that physicians are very reluctant to prescribe new antibiotics..
in fear of accelerating emergence of resistance..
so they keep it aside as a last line of defense..
and they prescribe more widespread antibiotics.
and this make pharmaceutical companies lose money..
for this reason, of the biggest 18 pharmaceutical companies..
only 3 are actively developing new types..
to put it simply, There's no longer money to be made in the antibiotics business.
2 day ago the "World Health Organization" issued a report titled "The world is running out of antibiotics"
where it stated that 12 new pathogens have developed immunity against most antibiotics in our arsenal..
an not enough research is being conducted to find any new cures..
In their opinion, research is no longer enough..
and all countries must cooperate to stop infection in the first place by raising awareness..
because fear now stems from the fact that we don't have enough firepower to help infected patients..
and that-in my opinion-a scary step backwards.
It is expected that by 2050 resistant bacteria will kill even more than cancer..
Evolution of bacterial is inevitable..
but so is the evolution of medicine..
so we must all cooperate and stop abusing antibiotics..
at least to not let bacteria win this race..
see you again..
