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The end of an era?

Nature Reviews Drug Discovery volume 6, page 28 (2007)Cite this article

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The final years of the Second World War saw the development of the first commercial antibiotic, penicillin, as a result of a transatlantic collaboration. A poster from this time showed a soldier and proudly declared that “Thanks to penicillin he will come home”. One of the perhaps less romantic realities of war in that era was that many more people succumbed to infections, secondary to other injuries and ailments, than from all of the direct deaths from bullets, bombs and other applications of military might. Penicillin started to tip the balance and in many senses launched the 'antibiotic era'.

Now we tend to take antibiotics for granted. But consider how essential these drugs are to today's society. They underpin all of modern medicine. Without them people would be threatened by the slightest injury, births of early-term infants would be near impossible, major surgeries and transplantations would be unfeasible, cytotoxic therapies for cancer would invite deadly infections, and hospital wards would become focal points for infectious diseases. In short, without antibiotics we would reverse the gains in life expectancy that were so hard won in the past century.

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References

  1. Infectious Diseases Society of America. Bad Bugs No Drugs. As antibiotic discovery stagnates a public health crisis brews [online], <http://www.idsociety.org/pa/IDSA_Paper4_final_web.pdf>(2004).

  2. National Research Council. Treating Infectious Diseases in a Microbial World: Report of Two Workshops (The National Academies Press, Washington DC, 2005).

  3. Canadian Institutes for Health Research.Novel approaches to Antibiotics; Is time running out? Workshop Report [online], <http://www.cihr-irsc.gc.ca/e/27879.html> (2005).

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  1. Centre for Microbial Diseases and Immunity Research, University of British Columbia, # 235 2259 Lower Mall, Lower Mall Research Station Vancouver, British Columbia, V6T 1Z4, Canada

    Robert E. W. Hancock

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  1. Robert E. W. Hancock
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Hancock, R. The end of an era?. Nat Rev Drug Discov 6, 28 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrd2223

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