The coming crisis in antibiotics

The first patient to be treated with an antibiotic

was a policeman from Oxford.

On his day off from work,

he was scratched by a rose thorn
while working in the garden

That small scratch became infected.

Over the next few days, his head was swollen

with abscesses,

and in fact his eye was so infected

that they had to take it out,

and by February of 1941,

this poor man was on the verge of dying.

He was at Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford,

and fortunately for him,

a small team of doctors

led by a Dr. Howard Florey

had managed to synthesize

a very small amount of penicillin,

a drug that had been discovered

12 years before by Alexander Fleming

but had never actually been used to treat a human,

and indeed no one even knew if the drug would work,

if it was full of impurities that would kill the patient,

but Florey and his team figured

if they had to use it, they might as well use it

on someone who was going to die anyway.

So they gave Albert Alexander,

this Oxford policeman, the drug,

and within 24 hours,

he started getting better.

His fever went down, his appetite came back.

Secondly, he was doing much better.

He was starting to run out of penicillin,

so what they would do was run with his urine

across the road to re-synthesize the penicillin

from his urine and give it back to him,

and that worked.

Day four, well on the way to recovery.

This was a miracle.

Day five, they ran out of penicillin,

and the poor man died.

So that story didn't end that well,

but fortunately for millions of other people

like this child who was treated again

in the early 1940s,

who was again dying of abscesses,

and within just six days, you can see,

recovered thanks to this wonder drug penicillin.

Millions have lived,

and global health has been transformed.

Now, antibiotics have been used

for patients like this,

but they've also been used rather frivolously

in some instances

for treating someone with just a cold or the flu

which they might not have responded to an antibiotic,

and they've also been used in large quantities

sub-therapeutically, which
means in small concentrations,

to make chicken and hogs grow faster.

Just to save a few pennies on the price of meat,

we've spent a lot of antibiotics on animals,

not for treatment, not for sick animals,

but primarily for growth promotion.

Now, what did that lead us to?

Basically, the massive use of antibiotics

around the world