Introducing Prognosis Season 3: Superbugs

Jason Gale (0:04)

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 antibiotic resistance.

Abdul Ghaffoor (0:26)

We are facing a difficult scenario to give chemotherapy and cure the cancer and get a drug-resistant infection and the patient dying of infection. We don't know what to do. The world doesn't know what to do in this scenario.

That's the, if you're talking about the post-antibiotic era, you first see that in cancer patients.

Jason Gale (0:49)

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.

Abdul Ghaffoor (1:12)

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.

Jason Gale (1:28)

That's Dr Abdul Ghaffoor, 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.

SPEAKER_3 (1:49)

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.

Jason Gale (1:58)

We investigate some of the unusual steps hospitals are taking to safeguard against hard-to-treat infections.

Here's the 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.

SPEAKER_4 (2:19)

Couldn't this be a way of actually doing global monitoring? So you could be sitting here in Copenhagen and then just let all the samples come to you.

Jason Gale (2:30)

Prognosis new season launches September 5 Subscribe today on Apple Podcasts, Pocket Casts, or wherever you listen.