Will we resist the bacteria of the future?
Every doctor can remember a time when bacterial infection laid waste to their patient with hair-raising speed and virulence. The most indelible for me occurred a decade ago during surgical night shifts. Again and again I was called to the bedside of a young woman with the ‘flesh-eating bug’, or necrotising fasciitis. By the time she’d presented to A&E, a recent graze to her leg was causing such disproportionate pain that her family had been forced to carry her. When the surgeons opened up the limb, they found carnage. Group A streptococcus – a bacterium that benignly colonises the throats and skin of millions of us – had burrowed from
