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Apr. 22, 2021 5:26 PM
Exactly five years have passed since the moment the world of medicine most feared became reality. In the spring of 2016, in Pennsylvania, a 49-year-old woman suffering from an infection was attacked by a bacterium bearing the gene scientists had feared: MCR-1. It was the first time a bacterium with this gene had been discovered in a human being. The bad news: The bacterium was resistant to the strongest antibiotic that existed, colistin. The worse news was that it could easily transmit that resistance to other bacteria.
Tom Frieden, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control at the time, immediately grasped the meaning of the development. “It basically shows us that the end of the road isn’t very far away for antibiotics,” he told the Washington Post.