The Auditor General of Canada says we need to do more to combat the threats posed by the emergence and spread of antimicrobial resistance.

Approximately 18,000 Canadians contract drug-resistant infections in hospitals every year.

McMaster’s Gerry Wright, a world leader in battling superbugs, says the future is grim without urgent action:

Wright, the director of McMaster’s Michael G. DeGroote Institute for Infectious Disease Research, says the battle against antimicrobial resistance has now become “an arms race.”

In 2014, Wright led a team that discovered a fungus living in the soils of Nova Scotia that could offer new hope in the battle against drug-resistance germs.

The team was able to derive a molecule from the fungus that is able to disarm one of the most dangerous antibiotic-resistance genes, known as NDM-1.

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