When We Lose Antibiotics, Here’s Everything Else We’ll Lose Too

This week, health authorities in New Zealand announced that the tightly quarantined island nation — the only place I’ve ever been where you get x-rayed on the way into the country as well as leaving it — has experienced its first case, and first death, from  a strain of totally drug-resistant bacteria. From the New Zealand Herald:

In January, while he was teaching English in Vietnam, (Brian) Pool suffered a brain hemorrhage and was operated on in a Vietnamese hospital.

He was flown to Wellington Hospital where tests found he was carrying the strain of bacterium known as KPC-Oxa 48 – an organism that rejects every kind of antibiotic.

Wellington Hospital clinical microbiologist Mark Jones (said): “Nothing would touch it. Absolutely nothing. It’s the first one that we’ve ever seen that is resistant to every single antibiotic known.”

Pool’s death is an appalling tragedy. But it is also a lesson, twice over: It illustrates that antibiotic resistance can spread anywhere, no matter the defenses we put up — and it demonstrates that we are on the verge of entering a new era in history. Jones, the doctor who treated Pool, says in the story linked above: “This man was in the post-antibiotic era.”