You know how doctors tell you to finish your course of antibiotics? Do that, please. The reason they tell you to do this is because bacteria, like humans, come in all kinds of strengths and some can easily survive the first antibiotic blast. If the course isn't finished, then you are naturally selecting the stronger bacteria to survive and pass on their genes, causing them to evolve antibiotic resistance. We're now at the point where some bacteria will survive any course of antibiotics that you throw at them, and will again survive to pass on their super-resistant genes. If this gets out of hand then we could well find ourselves back in a pre-penicillin era with rampant, untreatable disease. This, as you can imagine, is no picnic, so the experts are throwing themselves into finding a way to treat superbugs before we all succumb to the tonsillitis apocalypse. One way of potentially overcoming superbugs are with phagemids, bioengineered particles that are deadly to bacteria. Unlike traditional antibiotics, only target specific bacteria, leaving the others unharmed and not inadvertently creating new super-strains. In the war against superbag, some major breakthroughs have to come through in the next year or so, because we're running out of time.
