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The first patient to be treated with an antibiotic

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was a policeman from Oxford.

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On his day off from work,

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he was scratched by a rose thorn
while working in the garden

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That small scratch became infected.

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Over the next few days, his head was swollen

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with abscesses,

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and in fact his eye was so infected

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that they had to take it out,

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and by February of 1941,

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this poor man was on the verge of dying.

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He was at Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford,

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and fortunately for him,

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a small team of doctors

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led by a Dr. Howard Florey

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had managed to synthesize

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a very small amount of penicillin,

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a drug that had been discovered

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12 years before by Alexander Fleming

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but had never actually been used to treat a human,

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and indeed no one even knew if the drug would work,

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if it was full of impurities that would kill the patient,

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but Florey and his team figured

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if they had to use it, they might as well use it

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on someone who was going to die anyway.

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So they gave Albert Alexander,

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this Oxford policeman, the drug,

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and within 24 hours,

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he started getting better.

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His fever went down, his appetite came back.

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Secondly, he was doing much better.

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He was starting to run out of penicillin,

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so what they would do was run with his urine

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across the road to re-synthesize the penicillin

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from his urine and give it back to him,

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and that worked.

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Day four, well on the way to recovery.

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This was a miracle.

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Day five, they ran out of penicillin,

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and the poor man died.

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So that story didn't end that well,

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but fortunately for millions of other people

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like this child who was treated again

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in the early 1940s,

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who was again dying of abscesses,

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and within just six days, you can see,

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recovered thanks to this wonder drug penicillin.

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Millions have lived,

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and global health has been transformed.

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Now, antibiotics have been used

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for patients like this,

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but they've also been used rather frivolously

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in some instances

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for treating someone with just a cold or the flu

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which they might not have responded to an antibiotic,

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and they've also been used in large quantities

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sub-therapeutically, which
means in small concentrations,

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to make chicken and hogs grow faster.

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Just to save a few pennies on the price of meat,

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we've spent a lot of antibiotics on animals,

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not for treatment, not for sick animals,

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but primarily for growth promotion.

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Now, what did that lead us to?

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Basically, the massive use of antibiotics

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around the world