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  • 4 days ago
The world is on the cusp of an ominous development: Bacteria are building resistance to existing antibiotics faster than new antibiotics are entering the market. An ever-widening cavity is opening up. This "antibiotic gap", as experts call this development, marks the beginning of a new era in medicine. For the first time in recent history, we have to come to terms with the fact that not all bacterial infections are treatable anymore - with implications for all areas of medicine, from surgery to oncology. The WHO has been using the term "silent pandemic" since the fall of 2021 because, unlike Corona, antibiotic resistance is creeping into our society unnoticed - but it is shaking up our healthcare system just as overarchingly. The issue is currently so serious that it is being treated with the same degree of urgency on the international policy stage as climate change or migration.
Transcript
00:00My life has depended on the use of antibiotics.
00:04I wouldn't be alive today without antibiotics, and now they're not working to save my life
00:10any longer.
00:12The latest data shows the deaths are going up.
00:15We have a silent pandemic, so we really need to move now.
00:21It's definitely a pandemic, there's no question about it.
00:23One of the things that we struggle with is that it's a pandemic not of a single disease.
00:31How do you find the smoking gun?
00:34So how do you know what's emerged from the environment is ultimately causing the disease
00:40in humans?
00:44We're seeing very clear evidence that there are these new genes that are evolving in animals
00:48because of all this pressure of antibiotic use, and those are moving into pathogens that
00:53are infecting people too.
00:56These fungi, they make spores all the time, they spread.
01:00And this is happening and nobody has an idea what is happening.
01:05Extensive drug resistance can happen immediately.
01:09If you look at the number of cases worldwide, if you look at surveillance, if you look at
01:13the outbreaks, all of that is demonstrating that you have a very serious problem that in
01:19many parts of the world is accelerating.
01:23But then there's the places you've been able to institute proper mechanisms, you can also
01:28control things.
01:30Today we culture almost all known pathogens to man, so that's an incredible improvement
01:36in case of diagnostic.
01:38But can we find those patients who have the resistance?
01:41I want the general public to be aware that they need to use antibiotics appropriately.
01:47All of us have a responsibility here.
01:51I think we all have a capability of making change.
01:54And I predict that we will wake up too late unless we really up our game.
02:02We're choosing not to pay attention to it, we have made it silent.
02:06It's actually not that silent, it is actually not that hidden.
02:09We're sort of hiding from it rather than it hiding from us.
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