Antibiotic resistance is dangerously rising: my experience with a superbug

There were two weeks left until my dissertation was due and there I was, lying in a hospital bed, surrounded by piles of books, tapping away at my laptop. It couldn’t have happened at a worse time. The collapse came first. I woke up early on a Sunday morning feeling strange; not even ill, just a bit funny. Things rapidly deteriorated over the morning with the onset of a high fever and vomiting. Before I knew it, paramedics were stood over my bed prompting me to try to tell them my age, which I couldn’t remember, and whether I had recently had any infections. 

The previous week I had a mild urinary tract infection, but this was hardly out of the ordinary for me and I had gone to the doctor, taken the antibiotics I had been given, and had been feeling much better. They radioed through to a controller, telling them I had a likely case of sepsis, and I was taken to hospital by ambulance. 

Given the current rate of increase in superbug infections, forecasts have predicted that in the absence of drastic action, superbugs will cause 10 million deaths worldwide per year

This was devastating, but what came next was worse. While microbiologists tried to identify the bacteria causing the sepsis, doctors tried to treat me with a huge variety of different antibiotics. I failed to respond positively to any of them and was becoming progressively more ill. 

After four days, my worst fear had been confirmed. I was diagnosed with a superbug called ESBL E coli, highly resistant to the vast majority of readily available antibiotics. This a strain of the common and relatively harmless bacteria E coli that lives in the gut and can cause sickness bugs or other minor infections. This specific strain, however, has evolved antibiotic resistance over years of society’s misuse of antibiotics, such as in attempting to treat viruses like a cold and flu. 

ESBL E coli is not unique either. In fact, it’s only one strain of bacteria that appears on a list of the world’s 12 most threatening superbugs created by the World Health Organisation. Further, while I was successfully treated using powerful ‘last-resort’ antibiotics, many patients are not so lucky, with superbugs killing 700,000 people per year worldwide, including 5,000 people in England. 

As superbugs rapidly spread, this number is set to rise. Given the current rate of increase in superbug infections, forecasts have predicted that in the absence of drastic action, superbugs will cause 10 million deaths worldwide per year, the equivalent of a person dying every three seconds. This is greater than the number of deaths caused by cancer, which in 2016, was 8.93 million (17.08% of deaths globally), or the number of deaths caused by dementia, HIV/AIDS and diabetes combined, totalling 6.6 million deaths. 

While scientific research and social policy changes are vital, public attitudes must also change to combat antibiotic resistance, just like in the case of tackling climate change

We have entered a state of global crisis. Since 1984, all of the new antibiotics that have entered the market are simply variations on existing drugs and extensive research into the creation of new antibiotics has largely gone unrewarded. This has led Dame Sally Davies, England’s chief medical officer, to warn that antibiotic resistance is an apocalyptic threat that could kill us before climate change does. It seems that while the climate change crisis has everyone’s attention, this equally serious imminent threat is going unnoticed, with potentially fatal consequences. 

Just as Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin in 1928 changed the world, the rise of the superbug could reverse this, returning us to a dystopian society in which a paper-cut becoming infected could eventually kill you, routine surgeries become too dangerous to perform, and public gatherings are high-risk activities. 

Many people are concerned that they do not want the children of the future to never have the opportunity to see a polar bear and yet, there is a very real risk for the same children that playing outside and grazing their knee could be deadly, with the public doing little about it. While scientific research and social policy changes are vital, public attitudes must also change to combat antibiotic resistance, just like in the case of tackling climate change. This includes not using antibiotics for minor infections and following instructions carefully when we do use them. 

Until my own superbug experience, I was blissfully unaware of the waking nightmare that is antibiotic resistance. I thought of it as a problem of the distant future, easily solvable with the invention of new antibiotics; something I couldn’t do anything about. Now, I know better. The problem is immediate, there is no simple solution, and the weight of the issue is on everyone’s shoulders.