FORGET the rise of the machines. The rise of the superbug is happening right now — and our last defence has just begun to collapse. The world is on the brink of an antibiotic apocalypse.

A new dark age of medicine looms.

The world of our great-grandparents may be about to return.

It’s a world where one in every 200 mothers died after childbirth because of infection.

It’s a world where one in nine people who suffered an infected cut or scrape sickened, and died.

But that’s not all. Got a sore throat? It could lead to a heart attack.What about a funny tummy? Dehydration. Then death.

Why is this happening, now?

The antibiotics that changed the world with their introduction 80 years ago are rapidly becoming ineffective.

“If we continue on our current course, we estimate that by 2050, there will be an excess of 300 million deaths due to antibiotic resistance at a cost of over $100 trillion,” says infectious disease expert Associate Professor Sanjaya Senanayake of the Australian National University.

“Already, in the US there are over 2 million infections every year due to antibiotic resistance with over 20,000 deaths.”

Today comes news that even the last-resort class of super antibiotics have now been compromised.

Why?

The simple, valid use of antibiotics exposes bacteria to their effects. The bacteria then evolves to boost its chances of survival.

But antibiotics have also been overused and abused.

And, despite decades of warning, little has been done about it.

‘INEVITABLE’ EPIDEMIC

A new bacteria-resistant gene has been discovered in China.

It’s been found in people and pigs. It’s been found in the bacteria living among them. Some of these have epidemic potential.

One of them has been designated the MCR-1 gene.

Its discovery was described as “alarming” by scientists, who called for urgent restrictions on the use of polymyxins — a class of antibiotics that includes the drug colistin and is widely used in livestock farming.

“The polymyxins, such as colistin, are an old class of antibiotics that were recently resurrected as a last resort to treat extremely resistant superbugs,” Dr Senanayake says. “But now scientists have found superbugs in China not only resistant to colistin, but being able to easily transmit that resistance to other bacteria in little genetic packages called plasmids.”

Researchers led by Hua Liu from the South China Agricultural University who published their work in the Lancet Infectious Diseases journal found MCR-1 on plasmids — mobile DNA that can be easily copied and transferred between different bacteria.

This suggests “an alarming potential” for it to spread and diversify between bacterial populations, they said.

FARMING AWAY OUR FUTURE

Dr Senanayake is just one of many infectious disease experts calling for the urgent control of polymyxin use.

“About 80 per cent of the total volume of antibiotics used in the US are used in animals - not humans,” he says. “Given the contact we have with those animals and their food products, the resistance in animals becomes an issue in humans too.”

David Paterson and Patrick Harris from the University of Queensland, writing a commentary in the same Lancet Infectious Diseases journal, said the links between agricultural use of colistin, colistin resistance in slaughtered animals, colistin resistance in food, and colistin resistance in humans were now complete.

“One of the few solutions to uncoupling these connections is limitation or cessation of colistin use in agriculture,” they said. “Failure to do so will create a public health problem of major dimensions.”

The Chinese researchers already have evidence the MCR-1 gene is being transferred between common bacteria such as E.coli, which causes urinary tract and many other types of infection, and Klesbsiella pneumoniae, which causes pneumonia and other infections.

This suggests “the progression from extensive drug resistance to pandrug resistance is inevitable,” they said.

“(And) although currently confined to China, MCR-1 is likely to emulate other resistance genes ... and spread worldwide.”

This is not the only outbreak.

India already has its own antibiotic immune bacteria.

Discovered in 2010, the ‘superbug’ gene NDM-1 has since spread around the world.

QUICK FIX BACKFIRES

We take antibiotics for granted.

Which is why we can dismiss things as ‘simple tummy bugs’.

Since Penicillin was discovered in 1928, many millions of lives have been saved.

But we’ve overdone it.

Medical researchers have been warning for a long time that as much as half of all antibiotic prescriptions are unnecessary.

They’re often prescribed as comfort.

Not as an effective fix.

Now our doctors, surgeons and nurses will soon be paying the price.

That tummy bug will soon get much more serious.

That cough will more often turn into pneunomia.

We’ll be needing much more intensive care.

“Australia already has antibiotic resistant superbugs, but some parts of the world have much higher rates than us,” Dr Senanayake says. “However, don’t feel relieved as we know that Australians returning from overseas travel unknowingly return with such superbugs sitting in their bowels.”

Antibiotics aren't useless yet. But it does seem inevitable.

“There is growing awareness of this catastrophic issue,”Dr Senanayake says.

This week is World Antibiotic Awareness Week. It comes on the back of a number of initiatives such as Australia’s new National Antimicrobial Resistance Strategy and recognition of the issue by the G8 Science Ministers, British Prime Minister David Cameron and the US White House.

Carefully rationing what we’ve got left could win us a few extra decades.

But we’ll need new weapons in the fight against infection.

And soon.