Episode Information

What Happens When Our Medicine Stops Working? We are in a war against really smart bugs. The rise of antibiotic resistance and super-bugs is real. Antibiotics might be the keystone of modern medicine, but in the very near future they’ll stop working. It’s 2015. When we get sick we know we can reach for the antibiotics and everything will be fine. Take antibiotics out of the equation and we lurch back 200 years. In the nineteenth century a trip to hospital was often a death sentence. Modern medicine was born with penicillin, but now the antibiotic era is coming to a close. In less than a century, our modern miracle has been beaten into submission by the very bacteria it was designed to knock out. This is a documentary about the future of medicine. The antibiotic apocalypse is looming. We enter the world of everyday kiwis and talk to microbiologists and doctors, to explore what has gone wrong, what steps are being taken to plan for the future, and just how much risk we face.