Antibiotic resistance is a growing problem around the world. In fact, the creator of penicillin, Alexander Fleming, predicted that people would take the wrong doses of the new medicine and make bacteria resistant to it. And he was right. It was actually beginning to occur within his own lifetime.
"In 2016, the United Nations pronounced antibiotic resistance 'the greatest and most urgent global risk.' Without reliable antibiotics, even relatively routine surgery—Cesarean sections, hernia repair, appendix or tonsil removal—could be deadly."
Millions of people today are dying from antibiotic resistance because the drugs that doctors prescribe aren't working. But a new solution is bacteriophages. They are a type of virus, but they do not infect humans, like more well-known types of viruses. Instead, they attack bacteria - hence the name.
"...scientists estimate that phages cause a trillion trillion infections per second, destroying half the world’s bacteria every forty-eight hours."
