The bacteria may have entered her flesh along with shrapnel from the bomb detonated in Brussels Airport in 2016. Or perhaps the microbes hitched a ride on the surgical instruments used to treat her wounds. Either way, the “superbug” refused to be vanquished, despite years of antibiotic treatment.
The woman had survived a terrorist attack but was held hostage by drug-resistant Klebsiella pneumoniae, a bacterial strain often picked up by surgery patients in hospitals. Only by combining antibiotics with a new, experimental treatment did doctors finally rid her of the superbug.
Devastating drug-resistant bacterial infections like this one are all too common, and they represent an ever-growing threat to global health. In 2019, antibiotic-resistant bacteria directly killed roughly 1.27 million people worldwide and contributed to an additional 3.68 million deaths. In the U.S. alone, drug-resistant bacteria and fungi together cause an estimated 2.8 million infections and 35,000 deaths each year.
Dispatches From The Front 