The golden age of antibiotics is under threat

The COVID-19 pandemic, its ensuing health crisis, and public health measures to counter it have highlighted the devastating consequences of an infectious disease’s uncontrolled spread with no effective treatments. Antibiotics have so successfully treated bacterial infections that we have largely forgotten what it was like to live in the pre-antibiotic era and struggle to imagine what it would be like to live in the potential reality of a post-antibiotic era. The increasing spread of AMR is threatening to drag Australia, and the world, back to a scenario where we have no effective treatment for common bacterial infections. Currently manageable diseases are becoming untreatable: we are running out of effective antibiotics and our AMR defence systems need strengthening.