While much of our attention during the past few years has been focused on COVID-19, a more insidious and dangerous pandemic has been spreading unabated: antimicrobial resistance.

A recently published study found that, in 2019, around five million deaths were associated with antibiotic resistance, more than twice those due to COVID-19 in 2020.

The two main contributors to the emergence and persistence of antibiotic resistance are the ways antibiotics work and the ability of bacteria to combat them.

Bacteria are highly evolved lifeforms that have significant evolutionary advantages over us. One of these is their doubling time, which, for many of the common varieties of bacteria that infect us, is only 15-40 minutes.