<
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/jul/21/antibiotic-resistant-bacteria-increasingly-leaving-children-vulnerable-to-common-infections-global-study-finds>
"Harry Booth has had a rough run through Australia’s coldest months. The
13-year-old has been in and out of hospital with a range of common chest and
urinary tract infections that his doctors found challenging to treat.
Harry was born with kidney failure and began dialysis at six months old, before
receiving a kidney transplant from his father at age four. The surgery saved
his life but comes with a trade-off: he now needs to take medications that
suppress his immune system to prevent his body from rejecting the kidney.
It makes him more vulnerable to infections – and the bacteria which cause these
are resistant to several commonly used antibiotics.
Instead, doctors reach for different, less commonly used drugs and administer
them intravenously for several days, before sometimes giving him oral
antibiotics. Once, he required a procedure to clean the bacteria from his
bladder.
The treatments are often demanding and take him away from home and school.
Frequent antibiotic use is often a medically necessary, life-saving treatment
for patients like Harry but using the same antibiotic too much can also make
bacteria resistant to it.
His mother, Eileen, says while back-up treatments are working, she worries
about what will happen if her son’s infections become resistant to those drugs,
too. As it stands, they are carefully treated only if they meet certain symptom
and bacteria thresholds.
Harry is not an outlier.
Life-saving drugs used to treat common childhood infections are increasingly
failing and the resistance of bacteria to these medicines will only worsen over
the next decade, a global analysis has found."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
