Radiolab Live: Viscera — Antibiotic Apocalypse

Описание: From Radiolab, but live and on stage: There’s a war happening right now. And we’re losing.

Radiolab correspondent Dr. Avir Mitra takes the stage in front of a sold-out audience (including his parents). Live in New York City at The Greene Space, we go inside the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria and how infections that used to be treatable have suddenly become deadly.

It starts with a vacation gone wrong. When Tom gets sick in Egypt, doctors can’t figure out why antibiotics aren’t working. Within weeks, he’s in a coma, and his wife, epidemiologist Dr. Steffanie Strathdee, is racing to save his life. Tom and Steffanie are experiencing a life-threatening trend Avir has seen first-hand in the ER: the drugs have stopped working.

Bacteria can share resistance, evolve fast, and can outsmart modern medicine. But the antibiotic battlefield may not be in hospitals at all. In the United States, the majority of antibiotics aren’t used on people. They’re used on animals. Specifically in the farming industry, responsible for the poultry and livestock most Americans eat.

Avir infiltrates the world of “big chicken,” bringing Bruce Stewart-Brown, Chief Science Officer at Perdue Farms, to the stage. Bruce defied the norm in taking on a seemingly impossible challenge: raising animals without relying on antibiotics at all.

And finally, will the answer to microbial resistance come not from antibiotics, but something else entirely? Dr. Steffanie Strathdee (author of The Perfect Predator: https://zpr.io/bj3ALujEXBPr ) joins the stage as an expert on phage therapy, a new offensive tactic in the war against bacteria.

PLUS: A Q&A with Dr. Steffanie Strathdee and Bruce Stewart-Brown

Like the live show? Check out the Radiolab episode we made from it here: https://radiolab.org/podcast/antibiot...

This show was first recorded in front of a live audience in Little Rock, Arkansas in collaboration with Little Rock Public Radio, and again at home in New York City.

_This episode is the latest of Radiolab’s new live event and audio series “Viscera: Gripping tales from the human body.” Led by Radiolab Special Correspondent and ER Doctor Avir Mitra, each event is a conversation that takes the audience on a journey into a surprising, scary, or straight up strange tales from inside of us, and gives them a visceral experience with the viscera of us. Previous installments of this series include “How to Save a Life,” teaching hands-only CPR, and “The Elixir of Life” where the audience drank bifidobacterium, the magical component found in breast milk.

Episode Segments:
00:01 Welcome To Viscera
2:35 Avir’s Dad
5:30 MRSA's Rise
7:20 The Rise of Antibiotic Resistance
8:16 Is the Medicine Bubble Bursting?
9:21 Fleming Invents Penicillin
11:02 Steffanie & Tom's Vacation
15:40 The Bacteria Battlefield
21:17 Glow Stick Demo
25:10 Why No New Antibiotics?
27:59 Lance Price: Drug-Resistant Anthrax
30:25 Antibiotic Protocols
31:25 Agriculture
39:00 Bruce Stewart-Brown, Perdue Farms
56:54 Playing Offense Against Bacteria
57:17 Steffanie’s Fight to Save Her Husband’s Life
1:01:01 Bacteriophage Therapy
1:11:17 Is There Hope?
1:13:19 Being in a Coma
1:16:53 Q&A: Strathdee and Stewart-Brown



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Video by Simon Allen