Antibiotics are the cornerstone of modern medicine, treating everyday as well as serious infections. They enable safe surgery and childbirth, and help protect patients being treated for other illnesses, like cancer. When they fail, the consequences can be devastating.

Vanessa Carter, founder of patient advocacy group The AMR Narrative, knows this only too well.
A car crash in 2004 left Vanessa, then aged 25, with injuries to her abdomen, back, neck, pelvis and face. She spent the next 10 years undergoing multiple facial reconstructions – and three years fighting antibiotic-resistant infections in her face that left her in despair.

It was then discovered that her facial prosthetic – and later her bone – was infected with MRSA, a so-called superbug. The prosthetic was removed and, after cycling through yet more operations and different courses of antibiotics, the infection finally cleared. It was then she decided to put a stop to further reconstructive surgery.
“I will look like this for the rest of my life because it was more frightening to live with the resistant infections than it was to live with the facial disfigurement,” Vanessa says.

Vanessa’s case is just one instance of a life dramatically changing course due to drug-resistant infections.
Bacteria naturally evolve to outsmart antibiotics, but overuse and misuse of antibiotics is accelerating what is known as antimicrobial resistance, or AMR. If left unchecked, more than 39 million people could die of antibiotic-resistant infections between now and 2050, according to new data published by the Global Research on Antimicrobial Resistance (GRAM) Project. That’s around one death every three minutes.

“We never think a car accident is going to happen to us, just in the same way that we never think antimicrobial resistance will happen to us,” Vanessa continues. “It could happen to anyone.
“AMR is not a silent pandemic. It’s been here for a long time. We need to start acting on it.”