Status Updates From Het lichaam: een reisgids

At the current rate of spread, antimicrobial resistance is forecast just lead to 10 million preventable deaths a year – that’s more people than die of cancer now – within 30 years, at a cost of perhaps 100 trillion dollars in today’s money

In 1945, the year that Alexander Fleming won the Nobel prize, a typical case of pneumococcal pneumonia could be knocked out with 40,000 units of penicillin. Today, because of increased resistance, it can take more than 20 million units per day for many days to achieve the same result.

Lab assistant brought in a cantaloupe with a pretty golden mold, glowing on it, she recalled later. That mold proved to be 200 times more potent than anything previously tested. The cantaloupe was not preserved, but after the mold was scraped off, it was cut into pieces and eaten by the staff. But the mold lives on. Every bit of penicillin made since that day is descended from that single random cantaloupe.

The common cold is not a single illness, but rather a family of symptoms generated by a multiplicity of viruses, of which the most pernicious are the rhinoviruses. These alone come in 100 varieties. There are, and short, lots of ways to catch a cold, which is why you never develop enough immunity to stop catching them all.