Defeating the Superbugs
Antibiotic Misuse

Defeating the Superbugs

Bacteria gone Rogue

Horizon - Miniature World

Bacteria gone Rogue
Bactera

All around us there is an invisible world. The microscopic world of bacteria. Some of these bacteria are going rogue, becoming superbugs that we can't control.

Scientist "They're probably smarter than I am. They're able to adjust far more quickly than I can so they are able to develop resistance a whole lot faster than I can develop an antibiotic."


Antibiotics are one of the miracles of modern medicine and scientists now worry that superbugs are emerging which are becoming totally resistant to these drugs.

"That's the scary day, that's the day when for some unlucky person their day has come, right, that the drugs no longer work."

But researchers are engaged in a fight-back against the superbugs.

"Bacteria have been on the earth for billions of years, humans have been on the Earth a few hundred thousand years. Right so, they have the accumulated smarts of eons of generations. What we do have, as humans, is we have brains."

The rise of bacteria resistant to antibiotics is being seen as a major public health threat. So scientists are devising new and sophisticated ways to try to defeat the superbugs.