For the third in this series I am looking at our war against microbes. From the earliest days of bacteriology to the latest discoveries we have fought against bacteria, knowing that they can kill us….and that we need to kill them (well the bad ones anyway!)
In the years towards preceding the discovery of antibiotics the death rate from infections was scary. Despite incredible work done by long-forgotten names in bacteriology having an infection often meant a death sentence. In the 1840s Semmelweis had proved, but was ignored, despite abolishing death due to infection in women after childbirth in his maternity ward, that cleanliness could prevent hospital infections (where have we heard that message recently). John Snow had shown that infections can be water-borne and weren’t magically appearing out of nowhere, and Robert Koch explained to the Victorian world the basis of infectious disease. But all the explanations in the world didn’t help you if you contracted typhus or cholera. Then in the first couple of decades of the 20th century a fortunate observation by Alexander Fleming and some amazing chemistry by Ernst Chaim brought the world the first successful antibiotic – penicillin. Suddenly, bacterial infections were treatable – injuries that would have once proved fatal due to subsequent infection were now routinely treated. Millions of people survived illnesses that would have killed them. More antibiotics were developed and their use became routine and the fight against bacteria seemed to be winnable. Never underestimate your enemy…..
Mary Barber was one of the first to show that bacteria were becoming resistant to antibiotics. Indeed as early as the 1950s she was advising limiting the use of the antibiotics to ensure that resistance to the life-saving antibiotic penicillin. But that warning went unheeded, after all we had drugs that could kill bacteria by hitting a different target in the cell. Steadily we used more and more antibiotics, and unnoticed there were report in the scientific press suggesting that some bacteria were becoming resistant to more than one type of antibiotic. The word “multidrug resistance” was coined in the 1960s. Still we went on prescribing as we made newer antibiotics that could kill the multidrug resistant strains……Worse than that we used antibiotics right across the food industry in poultry, pigs, and cattle to keep infectious diseases at bay, even when there were no signs of infection in the flock/herd.
The doomsday scenario is the emergence of bacteria that cannot be killed by any of our antibotics. We are nearly there…..some bacteria have developed resistance to most antibiotics. What’s going on? How do they do it? Bacteria are simple right? Wrong! Bacteria are far smarter than we give them credit for. You and I can pass on our genetic material to our offspring only. We can’t give any to the man down the road (well, we can but he won’t pass on that to his offspring). We also can’t give our DNA to other related species. Bacteria can do both these things. They can share little bits of DNA (it goes by the technical term of horizontal gene transfer) and if those bits of DNA give them a competitive advantage….well they spread like wildfire. That is the basis of most antibiotic resistance in bacteria. One group of bacteria develop the resistance, and then transfer the genetic material that enables them to be resistant to other bacteria. Eventually, you end up with strains of bacteria that are super-resistant…..and these will, and in fact do already, cause hundreds of deaths. That number could escalate hugely. I don’t want to scare anyone but the World Health Organisation, and most western governments have identified the spread of multidrug resistant bacteria as just as big a threat as climate change. Personally I think it could be worse – but I am a pessimist. If we don’t start developing new antibiotics, and curb our use of the existing ones we will lose the arms race against bacteria. The golden age of antibiotics is behind us……..
So how do I find the cache? It is at 52 55.xyz -1 19.abc
Either of two of the names mentioned above will give you yz from their years of death, a third name gives you the bc. The numbers for x and a are the middle digits in the year that two of the people mentioned won a joint Nobel Prize. That’s your lot. Some trial and error required maybe……
You can check your answers for this puzzle on GeoChecker.com.