Why China is at heart of fight to head off antibiotic apocalypse

In November 2013, Natalie Beatty, a 37-year-old Australian living in Hong Kong, noticed some small red lumps on her right foot and leg.

“At first I thought they were mosquito bites but when they started to swell, I headed to hospital.” A doctor prescribed antibiotics, and sent her home. The next day, the lumps had swollen into egg-shaped boils. “The largest one, on top of my foot, was the size of a mango cut in half.”

Beatty returned to hospital. The doctor lanced the biggest boil (“Loads of gunk came out. It was like something out of the movie Alien”) and took a swab for analysis.

“He called the next day and told me I had contracted MRSA,” Beatty recalls. “He advised me to google it, and then come straight back to hospital.” What she read horrified her. “It’s a race against time to get the right antibiotics to fight the infection because if it spreads to your bones, blood or brain, you could die or end up severely handicapped.”

MRSA – the common name for the Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus bacteria – is a “superbug”. Respon­sible for about 250 deaths a year in Hong Kong, it is resistant to multiple classes of antibiotics. You can catch it through contact with an infected person or a bacteria-smeared object. In Beatty’s case, the doctor thought she might have picked it up during a foot massage. Fortunately, the next course of antibiotics she took proved effective, and she was restored to full health.

At the United Nations’ General Assembly in New York, in September, the emergence of drug-resistant superbugs, such as MRSA, was described as “the greatest and most urgent global risk”.