The Antibiotic Debacle

00:00:25

Dr.Kaylee Byers: Yup, you heard that right. A few months ago, Mark Leiren-Young thought he might lose his leg, and it all started with a tiny red spot.

 

00:00:35

Mark Leiren-Young: I had what looked like a bit of a red strip on my foot. Because I’ve had various diagnoses and I thought, “Oh, this is a mild case of whatever it is that I’ve got that puts me on a cane every few years.” I was in no rush to burden the emergency system or give up almost a full day to see a doctor going, “Yup, it’s a rash, and you’re having one of your flare-ups.”

 

00:00:59

Dr.Kaylee Byers: So instead, Mark stuck to his original plan and went to a comedy show that he’d been looking forward to for ages.

 

00:01:07

Mark Leiren-Young: I am sitting having a blast. When the show ends, I try and stand up and find I really can’t. Something’s gone on with my leg over the course of the hour and a half, two hours I’ve been sitting. So, I headed out to the hospital. You know you’re in trouble at the hospital when they speed you through. The emergency room doctor looks quite grim when he’s checking out my leg, which is now huge. The ER doctor said, “Do you know what necrotizing fasciitis is?” I said, “It means I’m only coming out of here with one leg,” and he did not correct me.

 

00:01:48

Dr.Kaylee Byers: If you don’t know what necrotizing fasciitis is, you may have heard of its colloquial and not at all terrifying other name, flesh-eating disease. But before they could be sure, they had to run some tests.

 

00:02:04

Mark Leiren-Young: I was lugged into an IV drip and they started me in antibiotics. My memory is it was about two hours that seemed like about two years as I sat there going, “Wow, I thought I had a little thing going on and I may be leaving here with one leg.”

 

00:02:24

Dr.Kaylee Byers: Turns out that Mark actually had an infection called cellulitis, and because of how high it had spread, Mark was worried it was too late to save his leg, but he was assured that the antibiotics were going to fix him up in no time.

 

00:02:37

Mark Leiren-Young: There was clearly a sense that the antibiotics were going to work magic on me because I was pretty much always told, “Don’t worry, you’re leaving tomorrow.” Tomorrow just kept changing to the next tomorrow and the next tomorrow and the next tomorrow because the swelling wasn’t going down. The pain was going way up.

 

00:02:56

Dr.Kaylee Byers: Mark’s infection was so severe that it took a while for the antibiotics to take effect, but thankfully, eventually, they did. It had him wondering though, what would happen if they didn’t? What if the infection was resistant to the meds?

 

00:03:11

Mark Leiren-Young: I have heard of antibiotic resistance and was mildly terrified that was what was going on when it was taking so long for me to recover. If the antibiotics weren’t defective, if I hadn’t had access to medication, if I’d even decided to spend one more night in my own bed, I am fairly certain I would’ve lost my leg. I definitely have more of an appreciation for antibiotics later before this because I’m very aware that that seemed to be plan A, B, and C for keeping both legs attached to my body.

 

00:03:46

Dr.Kaylee Byers: You are listening to Nice Genes, the podcast that prescribes a healthy dose of science to treat the pathogens that plague our world, brought to you by Genome British Columbia. I’m your host, Dr. Kaylee Byers, your treatment for scientific curiosity. Antibiotics can seem like miracle drugs. Imagine telling our ancestors that the infections that wreaked havoc on their communities could be cured with a simple little pill. For the better part of the last century, we’ve been able to rely on antibiotics to treat bacterial infections. They truly are one of the most revolutionary medical advancements in modern medicine. Not unlike a lot of other important scientific discoveries, it was a total fluke. In 1928, Dr. Alexander Fleming went off on a summer holiday.

 

In a haste to explore the Scottish countryside, he left his lab in a, let’s just say, less than tidy state. Atop of his cluttered desk sat a forgotten Petri dish containing a culture of staphylococcus bacteria. As the summer heat peaked and without anyone to tend to it, things in the dish started growing. When Fleming got back, he was greeted by a moldy surprise. Fleming took a closer look and saw that the mold was repelling the bacteria in the dish from growing around it. So, he got busy running some tests and discovered that the mold, which was part of the genus Penicillium, was producing a liquid that could kill these bacteria. Excited about the potential these findings could have for treating bacterial infections, he named this powerful juicy stuff penicillin.

 

Dr. Fleming thought he was off to the races, but his colleagues weren’t necessarily ready to jump on the moldy bandwagon. It turned out the process of purifying penicillin into quantities great enough for therapeutic use would be challenging, and some declared the mission as nearly impossible. Luckily, the scientific world didn’t give up. For nearly a decade, Fleming’s discovery remained stagnant as scientists searched for a mold strain that could produce penicillin on a larger scale. Eventually, the breakthrough came from an unexpected source. One day a new character enters the group chat.

 

Although there’s still some debate over who exactly they were, they earned the name Moldy Mary for procuring a moldy cantaloupe, the kind you would definitely pass over at your local supermarket bringing it to the lab. They realized that the mold on that cantaloupe produced 200 times the penicillin than previous strains. This fruitful find was the missing piece to the penicillin puzzle. It was a one-in-a-melon discovery. It took years, but during the Second World War, scientists had developed a process to mass-produce penicillin, and it became the first widely available antibiotic saving thousands of wounded soldiers.

On December 11th, 1945, Alexander Fleming was awarded the Nobel Prize for his initial discovery of penicillin. But even back then, he warned about the eventual threat of antimicrobial resistance. Now decades later, Alexander Fleming is giving us the big old told-you-so eye roll. The World Health Organization recognizes antibiotic resistance as one of the biggest health threats we face as a planet. While it’s tricky to pinpoint exact estimates, we know that in 2019, over a million deaths were directly caused by antibiotic resistance. As resistance grows, sadly, so will those numbers. But even though it’s a sobering statistic, we aren’t without hope.

 

00:07:35

Dr.Rylan Duivestein: So my name is Rylan Duivestein. I go by he/him. I am a family physician. I do some in-hospital work.

 

00:07:44

Dr.Kaylee Byers: As a doctor, Rylan regularly treats people with bacterial infections.

 

00:07:48

Dr.Rylan Duivestein: When I’m in a smaller community, somewhere between one in five and one in 10 patients is on antibiotics for some infection.

 

00:07:57

Dr.Kaylee Byers: He estimates that roughly one in 10 patients he sees require antibiotic treatments. So, let’s kick things off with how these meds work. Okay, you have a bacterial infection, you come in, you get an antibiotic prescribed to you, you take that antibiotic. How do antibiotics work typically?

 

00:08:15

Dr.Rylan Duivestein: So this takes me back to my biochem days. Classically, there’s two main ways we classify antibiotics. So, there’s bacteriostatic and bacteriocidal antibiotics. Cidal is like homicidal, so it’s a class of antibiotics that actually kill the bacteria. To give you an example, bacteria have a cell wall, which is like their skin, and they need their skin to be working properly to survive.

 

So, penicillin, which is a very common and well-known antibiotic, interferes with the functioning of the cell wall and therefore the bacteria die. So, penicillin is under the classification of a bacteriocidal antibiotic of which there are many. The bacteriostatic ones interfere with the bacteria from replicating. So, it doesn’t actively kill the bug, but it generally will interfere with the DNA replication process or protein synthesis, which will essentially lead to the bacteria not being able to reproduce, and then your immune system mops up the rest.

 

00:09:21

Dr.Kaylee Byers: What are some of the big bacterial infections? What are some of the bacteria that we might have heard about that we would typically treat with antibiotics?

 

00:09:29

Dr.Rylan Duivestein: Staph and strep are probably the most common ones you hear. Strep, of course, everyone will think of strep throat. Similarly, I think a lot of people will have heard of staph, which is another common cause of quite similar type infections, so skin infections. Sometimes you can get a staph pneumonia. Then probably the other ones people have heard of are things like E. coli, which can cause gastrointestinal illness as well as urinary tract infections. Then maybe the STIs, gonorrhea, syphilis, people have probably heard of those.

 

00:10:03

Dr.Kaylee Byers: If you haven’t heard of those, it may be time to have the talk with your parents or a friend, but that didn’t come from me. How did we get to the point that we’ve got bacteria now that are resistant to the antibiotics that we use to treat those infections?

 

00:10:19

Dr.Rylan Duivestein: I mean, I think the short answer is as we expose bacteria to antibiotics, they will develop resistance. So, the more overuse of antibiotics we have, the more resistance we expect. The longer answer, it goes back to natural selection really. So, anytime a bacteria replicates, little errors can be made in the replication process.

 

Most of the time these errors, they don’t amount to anything or they’re actually detrimental. But occasionally, an error might confer resistance to a certain antibiotic. Then if someone’s exposed to that antibiotic, all the ones that are not resistant will of course die. The ones that are resistant will become the majority of the population and those will replicate. Then all of a sudden, you have an antibiotic resistant infection.

 

00:11:07

Dr.Kaylee Byers: So thinking about we have these bacteria that acquire antibiotic resistance, so they maybe have genes that allow them to be antibiotic resistant for example. In your role as a physician, are there some antibiotic resistant bacteria that you’re most concerned about or that you think pose greater risks to human health?

 

00:11:25

Dr.Rylan Duivestein: Yes. I mean there’s the ones that we more commonly see, so we’re a little bit better at screening for them. So, MRSA is probably one of the most common ones that a lot of people have heard. It stands for methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus. Essentially, it’s the type of staph infection which is resistant to many of the first-line antibiotics we would generally use. So, I think part of the issue is the time-lapse you have. When someone comes in with an infection, you start them off on first-line antibiotics, and then you find out a few days later when their infection’s gotten significantly worse that they’ve got a resistant infection.

 

00:12:04

Dr.Kaylee Byers: This time period, the waiting game is exactly what our friend writer Mark Leiren-Young was worried about. If the first type of antibiotic didn’t work, by the time you try another one, will it be too late?

 

00:12:19

Dr.Rylan Duivestein: I think the other concerning part we see with antibiotic-resistant organisms is just we’re seeing more and more organisms that have multiple resistance patterns. So, they’re categorized as what’s called multi-drug resistant organisms, and they are resistant now to numerous classes of antibiotics. So, that can be really limiting in terms of what can actually be used when people get these infections. So, they’re a little bit rarer than something like MRSA, but we are seeing them more commonly for sure.

 

00:12:50

Dr.Kaylee Byers: What do you think the future of antibiotic resistance looks like? Based off of where we are now, where do you anticipate we’re going?

 

00:12:58

Dr.Rylan Duivestein: I would say the trends are a little bit worrying in the sense that anecdotally, I see more and more resistance both in terms of the frequency of which I’m encountering drug-resistant bacteria, as well as in the amount of bacteria that have multi-drug-resistant mechanisms in play.

 

So, that part’s concerning. I think the other concerning piece is the development of new antimicrobial agents is nowhere near what it was 10, 20 years ago. So, the bacteria are getting more resistant and we’re developing less and less medications that we’ll be able to deal with them.

 

So, I mean, I’m hopeful that we’ll be able to come up with new antibiotics, but I definitely think we’ve got some work ahead of us to ensure that we don’t get to a place where people come in with a cellulitis and we have nothing to treat them with.

 

00:13:53

Dr.Kaylee Byers: So all we need to do is find new antibiotics, problem solved. Well, hold on to your microbes, partner. Coming up, we are going to look into how we make antibiotics and what the future has in store.

 

You are listening to Nice Genes, a podcast all about the fascinating world of genomics and the evolving science behind it, brought to you by Genome British Columbia. I’m Dr. Kaylee Byers, your host, and we want to get more people to listen to the genomic stories that are shaping our world. So, if you like Nice Genes, hit follow on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your shows. If you’ve got an infectious curiosity for science, help spread the word by sharing the show with your favorite uncle or auntie-biotic. Get it?

 

So let’s get back to our history lesson, shall we? After penicillin came to market, there was an explosion of antimicrobial research, a golden age of antibiotic discovery, 1945 tetracyclines, 1948 cephalosporins, 1950s macrolides, 1962 quinolones. In 1974, in all its banana-flavored glory, amoxicillin hits the shelves and all of these can score you some serious scrabble points. But by the 1970s, antibiotic discovery started to slow down. Even though we had a robust roster of antibiotics to work with, we were thrown a real curveball.

 

00:15:28

Dr.Nadine Ziemert: There came a lot of antibiotics on the market, and then there was this notion that, okay, infection is not a problem anymore.

 

00:15:34

Dr.Kaylee Byers: That’s Dr. Nadine Ziemert, professor and antibiotic researcher at the University of Tuebingen in Germany. Before we look into how we can find new antibiotics, let’s take a step back to look at how they’re made in the first place.

 

00:15:48

Dr.Nadine Ziemert: I think most people just see bacteria as something bad. Most people know they’re causing diseases, they’re bad for you.

 

00:15:57

Dr.Kaylee Byers: Bacteria often get a bad rap, but they’re tiny, invisible powerhouses out there just doing the heavy lifting of ensuring ecosystem balance, supporting our health, and helping us make groundbreaking medical advancements. The irony is even for infections caused by bacteria, they’re the ones producing the remedy.

 

00:16:17

Dr.Nadine Ziemert: They produce a lot of our medication, for example, and they’re really prolific in producing these antibiotics.

 

00:16:25

Dr.Kaylee Byers: So let’s get into that. We know that the discovery of antibiotics was huge, and we know we’re going to need to find some new ones fairly soon, like now. But how do we go about doing that?

 

00:16:38

Dr.Nadine Ziemert: The way that antibiotics usually were found were that people went out, isolated some bacteria from soil, for example, and then they let these bacteria grow. They extract the compounds that these bacteria produces, and then they check if these extracts kill the bacteria that you want to kill. For example, if you look for something…

 

00:16:57

Dr.Kaylee Byers: There’s a lot of chemistry involved there, but basically in the hunt to find antibiotics, scientists go out into the world. They bring back samples of bacteria to the lab, and then they see if they produce antimicrobial compounds. It involves a lot of work in the lab, but really it’s about working with nature.

 

Roughly 75% of our antibiotics have been found through testing natural products like mold or soil. But if a bacteria makes an antibiotic that’s designed to kill bacteria, how the heck does it protect itself from its own medicine?

 

So you get these bacteria. It makes a chemical compound, which acts against the basic components of another bacterium, but that bacterium might also have those components. So, how does it prevent that antibiotic that it just produced for coming back and destroying itself?

 

00:17:46

Dr.Nadine Ziemert: Yeah, that’s a good question because that’s what we call self-resistance, right? Each bacterium that produces an antibiotic has to be resistant against its own antibiotic, otherwise it would commit suicide. There’s different ways to overcome that. So, these bacteria either produce something against structures that they don’t have. For example, there’s these two group of…

 

00:18:07

Dr.Kaylee Byers: Bacteria have options. They might make antibiotics that target their enemy’s unique features.

 

00:18:13

Tough Guy: Hostile target detected.

 

00:18:15

Dr.Kaylee Byers: If a bacteria’s antibiotic can’t find its target, it’s safe, or they might use a special self-defense mechanism like a bodyguard protein that keeps the antibiotic out or changes just enough to avoid being hit. Bacteria contain multitudes and they have a rich history of internal warfare.

 

00:18:34

Dr.Nadine Ziemert: This ancient war of bacteria, they produce something, these bacteria get resistant.

 

00:18:38

Tough Guy: I’m afraid my usefulness has come to an end.

 

00:18:41

Dr.Kaylee Byers: When one evolves a trait to counter the attack of the other, bacteria go, “Hold my beer.” You know what I love about all of that is we often think of a hierarchy of complexity when we’re thinking about organisms.

 

So, you might think humans are so complex when many other organisms, they’re all complex, they all have their own inner workings, but bacteria, we think of them as simple just because they’re small and they’re absolutely not. They are their own little universe, their own complexity, which I think you’ve highlighted there in just how these antibiotics get created and how they’ve evolved so that they don’t in turn come back and kill themselves, which I think is really fascinating.

 

00:19:24

Dr.Nadine Ziemert: Yeah, I mean if you think about that, then I think humans are pretty boring, right? Bacteria can do so many cool things. They can eat plastic. They can eat the worst chemicals and make them into something useful. They can grow on light. They can make antibiotics. I mean, their metabolism is just amazing. So, I think in that case, bacteria are like great factories that I think we’ll use in the future much more.

 

00:19:48

Dr.Kaylee Byers: To your point about their value, we are more microbe. Humans are made up of more microbial cells than we are made up of our own human cells. So, we owe a lot of our complexity to those little critters. But this complexity is also why it’s so tough to research them.

 

As Dr. Ziemert says, developing new antibiotics in a lab is a complicated and lengthy process. In fact, it takes roughly 10 to 15 years from the discovery of a new antibiotic to become available on the market and that also means this whole dance is very expensive. So, if we want to help solve the problem of antimicrobial resistance, we need to get creative with other processes. Enter our good old pal, genomics.

 

00:20:37

Dr.Nadine Ziemert: One of the ways that I think that’s very promising is using genomics that instead of looking for the actual chemicals that these bacteria produce, I can look at the blueprint.

 

Everything that the bacterium is able to produce is encoded in its DNA, right? So if I can find the genes in the DNA and have a way to translate these genes into predicting what chemicals they encode, then I can really pinpoint specifically to what bacteria are most proficient in producing antibiotic or which one strain, for example, would be able to produce something that we really think has a novel mode of action.

So, there it is mostly a question of “How well can I translate genes into these chemical compounds and antibiotics, and how well can I predict bioactivity?”

 

00:21:27

Dr.Kaylee Byers: There are several different classes of antibiotics each working in its own way to target bacteria. So, when we talk about novel modes of action, we’re referring to a whole new type of antibiotic. Think of them as the new kids on the block that bacteria haven’t had a chance to get to know and can’t defend themselves against yet.

 

00:21:48

Dr. Nadine Ziemert: This is something that is most promising for really fighting antibiotic-resistant bacteria. So, we are trying to figure out what genes are involved in making certain antibiotics. We are looking, for example, for these resistant genes that we can predict bioactivity of novel antibiotics. We are looking at the regulation.

 

For example, can we predict how you can turn these genes on? Because in bacteria, a lot of these genes are highly regulated and only produced under very specific conditions. In the lab, if you just look for these compounds, but you don’t hit the very specific conditions, you don’t find anything.

 

So, it’s looking for a needle in the haystack if you don’t know under which conditions these chemicals are produced. We have nowadays all this huge information. We have so many bacterial genomes. So, our lab really focuses on how can we use this big genomic data that we have from bacteria to actually find antibiotics in every way there is possible.

 

00:22:48

Dr.Kaylee Byers: Yeah, and that’s interesting that you mentioned that regulation. So, essentially, you might be looking at a bacterium where it’s like a light switch that’s always off and you’re trying to turn it on. So, you can see if it might be associated.

 

00:22:58

Dr.Nadine Ziemert: Or figure out what is the condition that it turns on. So, maybe they need light or some need iron, others need something else that they like to eat. So, that is very specific and very complex, but it’s somehow encoded in this blueprint in the DNA. That’s what we’ve tried to figure out.

 

00:23:17

Dr.Kaylee Byers: It’s like bacterial caregiving. I really like that. It’s like, “What do you need? Can I help you?”

 

00:23:23

Dr.Nadine Ziemert: Of course, one thing we want to figure out is first of all, how much diversity is out there, right? Because we see a lot of these bacterial compounds are already known. So, is it worth it to look for more? How much more can we make? So we know now that there’s much more out there, and I think we are just at the tip of the iceberg.

 

00:23:41

Dr.Kaylee Byers: Dr. Ziemert’s lab has created a specific genome mining tool with a fun acronym called ARTS, which stands for the antibiotic-resistance target seeker. It takes all that genomic information we have about bacteria and automates a system to identify key gene clusters for potential new antibiotic discovery. It’s really handy because when it comes to the array of chemical diversity out there, we don’t even know what we don’t know. I love that.

 

I want to look at the future of antibiotics and antibiotic resistance, and we’ve talked about some of the challenges the future faces in terms of antibiotic resistance and then also the challenges in just finding new antibiotics. I mean, what are the different promising ways that we could address this really urgent issue?

 

00:24:33

Dr.Nadine Ziemert: We should use every way we can. I think antibiotics in general, finding new antibiotics will be one of the major ways because they’re the fastest. The one that I think is also very promising and also needs to be developed is phage therapy.

 

00:24:48

Dr.Kaylee Byers: I’m going to pop in here for a sec because I am a very into phages. Phages, also known as bacteria phages, are viruses which can infect bacteria and make them pop. In biology, we say the bacteria has lysed, which essentially means destroyed.

 

00:25:05

Tough Guy: Hostile target detected.

 

00:25:07

Dr.Kaylee Byers: They are fascinating, and as Dr. Ziemert says, can be super helpful in treating certain bacterial infections, but they’re an option and not the solution. There is so much we still don’t know about them. So, using genomic data to help find novel antibiotics, phage therapies, those are both promising research areas, but there’s more to the solutions than just the science.

 

00:25:30

Dr.Nadine Ziemert: One really important thing, and I think that is also the easiest to implement, is antibiotic stewardship. That starts with really global agreements. When can we use antibiotic? How can we use them in animal husbandry, for example? It starts there, but it also ends up in our hospitals. So, these are really things we need to implement globally.

 

00:25:51

Dr.Kaylee Byers: Antibiotic stewardship is a really important part of this equation. Monitoring how we use these drugs is vital to controlling how effective they stay, and it’s bigger than just in our hospitals. Antimicrobial resistance also arises through use of antibiotics in agriculture and food systems to help prevent, treat, and control the spread of disease.

 

So, more advocacy, increased surveillance, and thorough regulation are necessary to reduce the threat of antimicrobial resistance in our agricultural systems. So, using antibiotics less frequently and using narrower spectrum antibiotics can help limit the likelihood of resistance. We also have a part to play as individuals. According to Rylan, sometimes that means trusting your doctor that less is more.

 

00:26:36

Dr.Rylan Duivestein: I can tell you as a physician, it is difficult when you’re seeing someone who they clearly want the quick fix, and there’s a lot of pressure to just write that prescription for antibiotics, even though it’s probably not in the best interest of the patient.

 

So, just from a patient’s perspective, it’s just being open to the fact that if you go and see your physician and they tell you that you have a viral illness, essentially, it’s going to be conservative management and waiting for your body to do its thing to be accepting of that piece.

 

00:27:07

Dr.Kaylee Byers: Viral illnesses are not the same as bacterial ones. Even still, not all bacterial infections should be treated with antibiotics. In my PhD, they used to run this program called like, “Do bugs need drugs?”

 

00:27:19

Dr.Rylan Duivestein: Program still exists?

 

00:27:20

Dr.Kaylee Byers: Oh, yeah.

 

00:27:22

Dr.Rylan Duivestein: Yeah. I’ve definitely heard the slogan. I think there’s posters or stickers that they still hand out and you can put around your office.

 

00:27:30

Dr.Kaylee Byers: Yeah, I should get one actually. That’d be fun sticking on my office door.

 

00:27:32

Dr.Rylan Duivestein: Yeah, bumper sticker.

 

00:27:34

Dr.Kaylee Byers: Oh, that’s a good idea like baby on board, but instead not all bugs need drugs. We’re taking requests for bumper stickers if anyone’s interested. We’ve been hearing about antimicrobial resistance for years, but after experiencing a global pandemic, it feels like we got a glimpse into how health crises, well, they don’t stop at the border.

 

We’ve just been through one global health emergency. I don’t know if you’ve heard of it, the COVID-19 pandemic, and I mean we’re still in it. How does that make you think about how we might approach antibiotic resistance moving forward?

 

00:28:09

Dr.Nadine Ziemert: So I think one problem with the COVID pandemic was that it also increased the problem with antibiotic resistance, because in a lot of cases, people also got antibiotics because they felt sick and they didn’t know it was a virus or not. That was increasing the problem. Where it helped us a little bit is to understand that we have to act now because we’ve seen with COVID how fast the global pandemic can spread, what exponential growth is.

 

So, I think the population got a little bit more aware of what the actual damages that infectious diseases can do, but there’s hope. I just want to make people aware there is this problem, but I also don’t want to make them scared of another thing. We have war, we have climate change, so I don’t want to be like, “Oh, there’s another problem that we can’t overcome.”

 

I just think that we need awareness here and that things like these podcasts can help with the awareness. So, I don’t want to make panic, but I also want to say, okay, we need to act now. We can really work on this problem.

 

00:29:23

Dr.Kaylee Byers: Our guests for today were Dr. Nadine Ziemert from the University of Tuebingen, physician Dr. Rylan Duivestein, and Mark Leiren-Young.

 

You’ve been listening to Nice Genes, a podcast brought to you by Genome British Columbia. If you like this episode, go check out some of our previous ones wherever you listen from. Share us with your friends and leave us a review. You can also DM the show on X by going to @genomebc.

 

If you’re listening with kiddos or a teacher looking to spice up your lessons, we have learn along activity sheets added to the show description of each episode. Antibiotic resistance could get out of hand, but what about a medical tool you have at your fingertips?

 

Next time, we are prescribing another dose of science. This time looking at how at-home test kits are helping us detect and treat cervical cancer.

 

00:30:08

Christina Price: I was just really proud of myself to have had taken that step of ordering the kit and doing the test, and as a result cured me of cancer.

 

00:30:21

Dr.Kaylee Byers: Thanks for listening and we’ll be penicillin you in for the next episode. Penicillin, it’s so good. I love it so much.