Engineering and Super-bugs

Another of the "wicked" problems that future engineers will struggle with.  From The Telegraph:

"The threat to the human race from deadly new disease strains resistant to drugs is “more certain” than that from climate change, the head of a new review set up by David Cameron into the crisis has insisted.

Up to 10 million people a year could die as a result of superbugs and drug resistant strains of diseases such as malaria within a generation unless urgent action is taken, according to projections calculated by a team led by Jim O’Neill, the City economist.

Yet despite widespread agreement among scientists about the scale of the threat the public is largely unaware, he warned.

The inquiry was set up earlier this year to search urgently for solutions to a problem Mr Cameron said threatened to cast the world "back into the dark ages of medicine".

In an initial assessment Mr O’Neill set out a Doomsday scenario, warning that without concerted global action to find new treatments and dramatically reduce overprescribing 300 million people could die in the next 35 years from currently treatable conditions."