Prognosis
The Startups Waging War Against Superbugs
- Indian researchers race to find new drugs to beat infections
- Many tell of friends who died in bacteria-filled hospitals
GangaGen lab in Bengaluru.
Photographer: Samyukta Lakshmi/BloombergAnand Anandkumar’s father was a physician who spent his career fighting infectious diseases in the South Indian city of Chennai. It was an infection that killed him.
In and out of hospital for a failing heart, he picked up a bug resistant to most antibiotics and died of complications from sepsis. The story is a common one in India, where so-called superbugs kill nearly 60,000 newborns every year. The rapid spread of resistant bacteria has now made India the epicenter of a war to prevent a post-antibiotic world, where people would once again die in their thousands of commonplace infections.