The hubris of humanity

The hubris of humanity is something that, in our current role as apex predators, can almost be forgiven. Evolution has armed us well, not with the obvious weaponry of tooth and claw, but with an altogether deadlier tool – acumen and reason.

And in so many ways we have used this to master the realm of the beasts – the angst of the hunted now firmly below us in the evolutionary tree. Yet, there is a storm brewing. A storm stirred up by a dangerous mixture of our arrogance and nature’s ingenuity.

To understand the threat we need of course to look to the world of microbiology. A world that, with the development of antibiotics, we once also had mastered. Ironically it was this mastery that would give evolution the perfect platform to select a new breed. A breed set to launch a prokaryotic assault from which we are rapidly running out of effective defences.

The long-known problem of antimicrobial resistance has been studied and discussed many times – and still there seems to be no real solution. True, screening and hygiene efforts in hospitals have seen certain ‘super-bug’ infections fall, and amended prescribing habits have no doubt had an effect – but in terms of a new weapon against drug-resistant microbes, we are left wanting.

Earlier this year the WHO released a report stating categorically that many patients around the world suffer harm because infections from bacteria, viruses, fungi or other organisms can no longer be treated with the common medicines that would once have treated them effectively. We are once again becoming the hunted.

Estimates from Europe suggest there are 25,000 excess deaths each year due to resistant bacterial hospital infections, and approximately 2.5 million avoidable days in hospital caused by antimicrobial resistance. In addition, the economic burden from additional patient illness and death is estimated to be at least €1.5 billion each year in healthcare costs and productivity losses.

Yet there is hope. New chinks in the microbial armor are being found and exploited all the time – from understanding and manipulating how populations of microbes communicate (quorum sensing) to turning their own formidable weaponry against them. And it is the latter – the use of bacteriocins – that is generating a lot of interest in terms of human therapeutics.  On page 18 we learn more of how these antibiotics could strike a blow to the ‘super-bugs’.