The bug stops here?

What can we do about the fact that microbes are fast evolving to fight our antibiotics? New solutions involve using AI (of course), studying wastewater for early detection — and mining the Tree of Life for compounds that helped in the ancient past

- Sukanya Datta

“The time may come when penicillin can be bought by anyone in the shops. Then there is the danger that the ignorant man may easily underdose himself and by exposing his microbes to nonlethal quantities of the drug make them resistant.”

That was Alexander Fleming, speaking the year he won a Nobel Prize for his discovery of penicillin, in 1945.

We are living in the world he warned of.

As of 2023, one in six bacterial infections causing common diseases was resistant to existing antibiotic treatments, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported, last month. In 2019, nearly 5 million deaths were linked to antimicrobial resistance (AMR), the report states.

“Antimicrobial resistance is outpacing advances in modern medicine,” WHO director-general Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said, in a WHO statement accompanying the report.

Efforts to combat this threat include initiatives such as World AMR Awareness Week (November 18-24; initiated in 2015). Ahead of this year’s awareness week, Bengaluru hosted a symposium organised by the American Society for Microbiology (ASM) and the Centre for Infectious Disease Research at the Indian Institute of Science (CIDR-IISc), from October 29 to 31.

“This is a problem we will never really solve,” Stefano Bertuzzi, chief executive officer of ASM, told Wknd, speaking from the event. “There is no one silver bullet. As Fleming predicted, this is now a very crucial and silent threat. But there are interventions, tracking systems and solutions being framed to manage it.” (Some are taking shape in India; more on that in a bit.)

Dosed and confused