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Antibiotic-Resistant Superbugs Could Be Worse Than Covid-19
The author of ‘Biography of Resistance: The Epic Battle Between People and Pathogens’ explains an overlooked and incoming crisis
The doctors were stumped. They were trying to treat a woman in her seventies who had fallen, broken her femur, and contracted a bacterial infection during a trip to India. Back in the United States, the physicians treating the woman in a hospital in Reno, Nevada, discovered that the bug in question was something called carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae, or CRE. But no matter how many antibiotics they tried — and they would administer 26 in total — none had any effect. Two weeks after being admitted to the hospital, the patient died.
Muhammad H. Zaman begins his alarming new book, Biography of Resistance: The Epic Battle Between People and Pathogens, with this disturbing story. Zaman, who is a professor of international health and biomedical engineering at Boston University and a 2020 Guggenheim fellowship recipient, uses the tragic case to demonstrate how we’ve reached the tipping point of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, also known as “superbugs.” Among the culprits for their emergence: the widespread use of antibiotics in agriculture and livestock, as well as overprescribing the drugs for medical ailments and the general foot-dragging by pharmaceutical companies not stepping up to develop new ones.
“The rise of superbugs means that our most potent arsenal against bacterial infections — from pneumonia to typhoid, strep throat to staph infections — no longer will perhaps work anymore,” Zaman told me. In short, this overuse of antibiotics over the decades has and continues to cause immunities to these historically tried-and-true drugs.
“It means that not just one, but dozens of diseases can and will become incurable,” Zaman says. The disease that has consumed all of our attention in the present moment, Covid-19, is obviously bad. The picture that forms while reading Biography of Resistance is that our inability to stop superbugs could be much worse and grave.
Zaman worries that Covid-19 and bacterial antibiotic resistance “can converge and pack an infinitely more powerful punch together,” he says. “People who…
