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Global disease outbreaks can occur, as we saw with the Covid pandemic, seemingly overnight. But they can also be like a slow-motion car crash, which is how I describe the growing threat of antibiotic resistance.
And at this very moment we are out of control.
Take sexually transmitted infections (STIs) for example. Diseases such as syphilis and gonorrhea were once death sentences, but with the introduction of penicillin as a medication in the 1940s, they became easily treatable.
Today, sexual health clinics are filled with patients suffering from drug-resistant STIs caused by overuse of antibiotics.
By 2040, we may start to see people in the UK dying from these infections. The same goes for common insects that are contracted during childbirth.
Before antibiotics, babies and mothers routinely died during or shortly after birth. The return to this era is coming, there is no doubt about it, writes David Sweetnam
By 2040, we may start to see people in the UK dying from infections as bacteria can become resistant to antibiotics.
Diseases such as syphilis (pictured) and gonorrhea were once death sentences, but with the introduction of penicillin as a medicine in the 1940s, they became easily treatable.
Before antibiotics, babies and mothers routinely died during or shortly after birth. A return to this era is coming, there is no doubt about that. It’s already happening in Africa and South Asia, where drug-resistant microbes are more common and access to rarer, more expensive antibiotics is limited.
We live in a global village and NHS patients will also suffer the same fate over time.
The worrying truth is that not enough research is being done to find new alternatives.
Governments, pharmaceutical companies and research centers such as the INEOS Institute in Oxford are working together to develop new antibiotics, but the reality is that it takes more than ten years to develop a single new drug that is safe for human consumption.
We must also limit the number of antibiotics used in agriculture. Currently, 75 percent of all human antibiotics are given to livestock to keep them healthy.
But this will only give us breathing room to find longer-term solutions. Antibiotic resistance is inevitable and we need a new way to protect ourselves from bacteria.
With the help of artificial intelligence and futuristic technology, such as genetically modified viruses that can attack disease-causing bacteria, we can fight back.
The need for new treatments is clear. Unless drastic measures are taken, we face a return to the pre-antibiotic era, where an infected blister, small cut or urinary tract infection can prove fatal.