Red Emma’s

Antibiotics: the next frontierFrom the early decades of the 20th century, antibiotics transformed medicine, making mortality from bacterial infections a rarity in developed nations. However, we currently face a crisis of antibiotic resistance, with infection-causing bacterial pathogens increasingly acquiring or evolving the means to mediate infection in the presence of antibiotic therapy. In this Baltimore Science Café, we will discuss the past, present, and future of antibiotics, with particular emphasis on new strategies to treat bacterial infection. We will talk about what antibiotics are, how they act to cure bacterial infection, and how bacteria evade them. We will address important questions including: What caused the current crisis in antibiotic resistance? What are scientists doing to combat this problem? What kinds of therapies are on the horizon to avoid a return to a pre-antibiotic era of life-threatening bacterial diseases? What can you do to help?