We should all appreciate the miracle of modern antibiotics
SINGER Sophie Ellis-Bextor was a guest at a National Portrait Gallery gala this week. Appropriate, considering her face is as pretty as a picture. IF there’s one medical marvel I’ve utterly stopped taking for granted since shattering my left arm two months ago, it’s the protective power of antibiotics. Without them I could well have lost the limb below the elbow; worse, I could have succumbed to the dreaded scepsis and now be pushing up the dandelions at my local cemetery. I developed a very nasty infection in my operation scar after having titanium plates and screws implanted. Orthopaedic surgeons hate this happening when metal is involved. If the bacteria penetrate down to the plate the bugs stick to the titanium and because there’s no blood flow there, even the most powerful antibiotics can’t touch them. They have a field day, multiplying with impunity. All sorts of complications can swiftly arise: it’s nasty stuff.
The trick is to identify the infection extremely early and swamp it with great doses of penicillin-based drugs. I caught mine in time, but it took three weeks of pill popping to nail it. An acquaintance who ignored an infection in a recently-operated on broken ankle ended up in hospital for weeks on intravenous antibiotics and believe me it was touch and go.
Until little more than half a century ago infection was the great scourge of mankind. Historian Ian Mortimer’s hugely readable new book in his Time Travellers Guide series – this latest one’s a romp through Restoration Britain of the 1600s and 1700s – makes this abundantly clear. Four centuries ago, average life expectancy was 35. Thirty-five! This was in part due to the staggering rates of infant mortality: one in three children didn’t see their fifth birthday. It was infections that mostly dragged them down, their juvenile immune systems unable to cope with bugs that a course of penicillin makes short work of today.
If you made it through childhood you could expect to stagger on into your mid-forties, if you were lucky – and male. Five per cent of women died in childbirth, but another 15 per cent perished of so-called “childbed fever” shortly afterwards, succumbing to bacterial infections in the womb or birth canal.
It was, in short, carnage. So I’ve been remembering Alexander Fleming in my prayers of late. If he hadn’t spotted penicillin chomping up bugs on a dirty petrie dish, I’d either be typing this one-handed – or not at all. And you might not be here to read it.