FRONTLINE: Hunting the Nightmare Bacteria
Catalogue Number: 041887
Producer: PBS Video
Subject: Current Events, Global Issues, Health and Medicine, Medicine, Science
Language: English
Grade Level: Post Secondary, Adult
Country Of Origin: United States
Copyright Year: 2017
Running Time: 55:42
Closed Captions: Yes
"Nightmare bacteria." That's how the CDC describes a frightening threat spreading quickly in hospitals, communities, and across the globe. Correspondent David E. Hoffman investigates the alarming rise of untreatable infections: from a young girl thrust onto life support in an Arizona hospital, to a young American infected in India who comes home to Seattle, to the discovery of a rare superbug in Houston hospitals. The film also goes inside an uncontrollable outbreak at the nation's most prestigious hospital, where eighteen patients were mysteriously infected and six died, despite frantic efforts to contain killer bacteria. Fueled by decades of antibiotic overuse, the crisis has deepened as major drug companies, squeezed by Wall Street expectations, have abandoned the development of new antibiotics. Without swift action, the miracle age of antibiotics could be coming to an end: There are now predictions that by 2050, antibiotic-resistant superbugs could kill more people than cancer.
Related Titles
FRONTLINE: Outbreak
PBS Video 041798Why wasn't the Ebola outbreak stopped? When the largest Ebola outbreak on record began to...
Rise of the Superbugs
Films Media Group 394439Before the advent of antibiotics in the 1930s it was not uncommon for people to die of pneumonia or...
The Ebola Plague: W5
CTV CTV638It can seem as odd as it is frightening, how a virus that can be killed with a bit of bleach can be...