We've got used to the fact that if you have a small infection,
if you have a cut, if you need an operation,
then you can use antibiotics and the infection won't be serious.
Unless we get a grip on resistance to the antibiotics,
people will die from these things.
The issue of anti-microbial resistance
is up there with climate change.
The World Health Organisation says drug-resistant diseases
already kill at least 700,000 people each year.
But there could be 10m deaths each year by 2050
unless new antibiotics are found.
There's a serious lack of new antibiotics under development.
And the number of drug resistant bloodstream infections
increased by a third from 2013 to 2017.
So NDM-1 is a resistance protein that's
able to break down antibiotics and leaves them inactive.
Now, originally, it came from hospitals in India, New Delhi
specifically.
And now we're seeing the spread of that
through to countries such as Italy,
where 350 cases have been reported within the last six
months.
And that's particularly concerning,
because we're seeing the spread largely due to travel.
And that's a real problem, because it
means that we're all potentially affected by this issue.
The UK is leading the hunt for new antibiotics.
Much of the research is taking place
at the government backed AMR Centre in northwest England.
The antibiotic market is broken.
There's been no new drugs for 30 years,
because the reward to invest in those products just
isn't there.
Antibiotics are really cheap.
They're a dollar a strip.
The value is not there for somebody
to bring a new one to market at the moment.
That's part of what the AMR Centre is trying to do,
is bridge that gap between discovery and proving
the things in clinic.
The AMRC partly owes its existence
to economist Jim O'Neill.
His 2016 report for the UK government
found the widescale use of antibiotics
in industrial farming helped bacteria adapt and thrive.
O'Neill called for a big reduction
in the amount fed to animals.
And he criticised the pharmaceutical industry
for cutting back on antibiotics research.
Even small biotechs were starting to give up.
A lot of people think it's just an issue about incentivising,
and therefore, paying the big pharma.
Why should governments do that?
But what they ignore is the link between the chain all the way
down to the earliest stage.
Because the genuine risk-takers that
are coming through the so-called biotech world, that
are backing these very visionary, and creative,
and highly risky start-ups, unless there
is a takeout for them they're going to stop too.
To develop a new medicine takes 10 to 12 years
and considerable investment.
But importantly, it also takes expertise.
You need experts continuously working on this.
And that needs to be sustainable for companies.
And we know there's market failure for companies
researching in antibiotics.
And we've seen companies not being
able to carry on research into antibiotics.
The UK, at least, is making progress.
Since 2014, it has cut the amount
of antibiotics it uses by more than 7 per cent.
And sales for use in food producing animals
have dropped by 40 per cent.
The UK has unveiled a plan to control AMR by 2040.
But O'Neill says policymakers could do more.
They need to fix the broken antibiotics
market by developing what he calls a market entry reward.
Provide something in the vicinity
of a billion dollars for the right producer
of a new urgently needed drug.
A second alternative is you just take it completely away
from pharmaceutical companies and have a utility type entity
or government backed entities that just do it themselves,
and just say, OK, if you guys just
want to live in the profit world, its none
of your responsibility anymore.
After penicillin was discovered in 1928, deaths from infections
plummeted and operations became routine.
But Sir Alexander Fleming himself
warned about the risk of microorganisms
developing resistance.
Ninety years on, the world is on the brink of falling back
into the medical dark ages.
A future where you die from a cut finger
sounds like something you might see in a science fiction film.
But the scientists here know they're in a race against time.
And unless we wake up, that dystopian future
will become a reality all too soon.