Every year more people die from microbes that have evolved to evade modern medicine, than do from malaria and AIDS combined. By the year 2050, antimicrobial resistance could overtake cancer as the leading cause of death. The post-antibiotic apocalypse is already here, and we need to learn to live with it, argue Lorenzo Servitje and Clare Chandler.

You have been exposed to antimicrobial resistance. You have likely seen news stories about “the silent pandemic” and warnings about “superbugs.” A doctor may have hesitated to prescribe you an antibiotic or a pharmacist counselled you to take your entire course of antibiotics, even if you felt better. For those unfortunate enough to develop an infection that is drug resistant, this can mean a hunt for a next-line antibiotic and if that fails, a long period of recovery as the body uses its own defences to fight the infection. Sadly, for many, recovery becomes impossible. Patients, families and health care workers become reminded of the miraculous quick-fix that antimicrobial medicines are, and how we have come to take them for granted.

Understandably, a future without antibiotics looms as a dire spectre. The language used to describe such a future is often apocalyptic in nature, much like in the case of climate change. But like climate change, the warnings are not about a distant future that we’re trying to prevent. Antimicrobial resistance is already here.

Unopened Penicillin Ampoule (1946), first discovered in 1928, and later synthesized
into a therapeutic at scale in 1945.