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| COSTING THE EARTH
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| | | Costing the Earth tells stories which touch all our lives, looking at man's effect on the environment and at how the environment reacts. It questions accepted truths, challenges the people in charge and reports on progress towards improving the world we live in. | | | | | LISTEN AGAIN 30 min | | | |
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'Being the first to bring challenging scientific theories to a wider audience is something Costing The Earth relishes.'
Tom Feilden
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Resisting Nature
For fifty years mankind has relied upon antibiotics to fight infection. But these days the drugs don’t work. More and more common infections are becoming resistant to the major antibiotics. In past decades the chemists would come up with a new family of pharmaceuticals to fight the resistant bugs but now, it seems, there’s nowhere left to go.
In ‘Costing the Earth’ Tom Feilden asks if we’ve lost the war against bacteria or just the first battle. He meets the scientists who are revealing, for the first time, the great flood of antibiotics we’ve unleashed upon the environment. They’re proving that the drugs taken in homes and hospitals and forced down the throats of intensively farmed pigs and poultry find their way into the rivers and fields, returning to humans in our meat, our crops and even our drinking water.
But is there a solution? Tom visits the Federal Institute of Hydrology in Germany where they’re developing simple, cheap techniques to remove pharmaceuticals from the waste that fertilises our soil and ultimately finds its way into our drinking water.
Alternatively, can we find new antibiotics that will beat the resistant bacteria? The usual sources- soil micro-organisms- may be exhausted, but a new company, Aquapharm believes that the deep oceans may hold the sources for a whole new generation of antibiotics.
Or can we find new ways to kill bacteria? Bacteriophages were first discovered in the filth of the River Ganges a century ago. They’re natural viruses that kill bacteria. The Soviet Union quickly put them to good use fighting infection during the Battle of Stalingrad although the success of antibiotics prevented their transfer to the West. But now, in this age of antibiotic resistance, scientists all over the world are hoping to develop their bug-killing powers.
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RELATED LINKS
Eravmis Project - identifying antibiotics in soil and water
Soil Association - highlighting concerns about antibiotics in meat
Poseidon Project - new ways to remove antibiotics from water
Strathclyde University - developing bacteriophages to fight infection
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