Question: As you have heard; by 2050 there will be superbugs within the human body that will be immune to most drugs, and are predicted to kill more than cancer. I would like to know how drug use would be changed to reduce the rise of resistance.

Lindsay Robinson answered on 10 Jun 2016:

Great question, Matty.

The problem is that these superbugs are really good at working out how to change themselves to resist the antibiotics. The more antibiotics that the bugs see, the better they get at resisting it. These bugs multiply and the new bugs are already resistant and over time the antibiotics become useless.

The only thing we can do is reduce the amount of antibiotics used. Antibiotics are probably over prescribed when people have coughs and colds which they don’t help to cure. Antibiotics only fight bacteria and not viruses. Another big problem is that antibiotics are used too often in farming animals and in the developing world, often “just in case” rather than because the animal is ill.

We are always doing research to find new antibiotics but this can take years. But the problem is still the same ifwe don’t reduce the amount of antibiotic mis-use.