Skip to 0 minutes and 12 seconds In transmitting and fighting infection, we’re going to start off by focusing on the infectious diseases and the different types of microorganism such as bacteria and viruses that cause these infectious diseases. Some of these we’ll all be fairly familiar with. We’ve all had colds, the flu, some of us will have had other types of infectious disease. Other ones will be a bit more exotic so we will be looking at these different types of organism and how they cause the disease. Then we will go on to look at how our body fights off bacteria and viruses when we are infected, and how that immune system is able to protect us from future infections from the same bacteria and viruses.
Skip to 1 minute and 3 seconds A lot of the protection against disease that we now have is due to antibiotics that have been developed during the 20th century. The problem with antibiotics is the bacteria actually develop resistance to them. This resistance to antibiotics has developed to a level where now, we actually have many types of bacteria that are resistant to most of the antibiotics that we have. If we don’t get a grip with this challenge, in the future we might face the situation that was present over 100 years ago, when there simply weren’t antibiotics capable of treating these infections. And then we’ll see more illness and, unfortunately, more deaths.
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