‘I feel lucky’: how a life-threatening infection inspired a mission to fight superbugs – Telegraph.co.uk

After three years Greg told doctors he no longer wanted to take the pills and now goes back for a blood test every year.

Jeremy Knox, policy lead for drug-resistant infections at the Wellcome, says that Gregs experience shows the threat drug resistance poses to modern medicine. It wasnt the complex surgery that almost killed him, but an infection.

Procedures such as this should be routine and as technology advances they get safer and more routine. Antibiotics are a basic medicine that we rely on as a safety net but if they no longer work surgery become risky. We could go backwards rather than forwards, he says.

One side effect of Gregs treatment is that he became more and more interested in drug-resistant infections.

I realised that I was one of the lucky ones. I could have had an infection that was impossible to treat but I didnt. I got really interested in it and was learning about how bacteria can pass resistance around to each other, he says.

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'I feel lucky': how a life-threatening infection inspired a mission to fight superbugs - Telegraph.co.uk