Odd Lots - Introducing Prognosis Season 3: Superbugs

Episode Date: August 27, 2019

On this new season of Prognosis, we look at the spread of infections that are resistant to antimicrobial medicines. You're probably more likely to have heard of these as superbugs. Their rise has been described as a silent tsunami of catastrophic proportions. We travel to countries on the frontline of the crisis, and explore how hospitals and doctors around the world are fighting back. Prognosis’ new season launches Sept. 5. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Thanks for listening to Odd Lots. Follow the show on Amazon Music for more future episodes or just ask, Alexa, play the Odd Lots podcast on Amazon Music. It can be one of the worst days of someone's life to get a cancer diagnosis. For a long time, patients at least knew chemotherapy was one path to being treated. In some countries, that path has become a lot riskier. That's because of the emergence of bacteria with the most extreme form of antibody. resistance. We are facing a difficult scenario to give chemotherapy and cure the cancer and get a drug risk infection and the patient dying of infections. We don't know what to do. The world doesn't know what to do in the scenario. That's the, if you're talking about the post-antibiotic era, you first see that in cancer patients. I'm Jason Gale, a senior editor with Bloomberg News. On this new season of prognosis, we look at the spread of infections around the world that even our most potent antimicrobial medicines can't stop. It's been described as a silent tsunami of

catastrophic proportions, and it's happening faster than scientists previously thought. The situation is getting worse, definitely getting worse, because the drug resistance rate, the superbug rate is increasing on a daily basis. It's increasing. So the number of patients dying are really high. That's Dr. Abdul-Gafour, one of India's fiercest anti-superbug crusaders. This season, we look at how researchers in the United States and elsewhere are looking for ways to fight back against superbugs, whether it's by turning to unlikely sources or trying radical experiments.

We just hoped that nothing would happen because we were worried that he could die of septic shock because essentially we were injecting a billion viruses into his body. We investigate some of the unusual steps hospitals are taking to safeguard against hard-to-treat infections. Here's a rectal swab. It's pretty straightforward. You can either take it yourself or otherwise one of the nursing staff can take it. And we look at how scientists in Denmark are tracking the global spread of superbugs from waste

collected from airplane bathrooms. Couldn't this be a way of actually doing a global monitoring. So you could be sitting here in Copenhagen and then just let all the samples come to you. Prognosis new season launches September 5. Subscribe today on Apple Podcasts, Pocketcasts, or wherever you listen. The news doesn't stop on the weekends. Context changes constantly. And now Bloomberg is the place to stay on top of it all.

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