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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…
