Show notes:

In this episode, we imagine a post-antibiotic future for India - where bacteria have learned to fight our entire arsenal of antibiotics. This future is rather dystopian, but don’t worry, we have experts who will tell us how we can avoid getting to this future. We hear of solutions for the social problems we need to crack, and we have an expert whose small company in Bangalore is developing a whole new class of antibiotics. 

Bonus episode coming soon!

Imagined Tomorrow is created and hosted by Shreya Dasgupta. The episode was co-edited by Abhishek Madan. Intro and outro music is by Abhijit Shylanath. Get in touch via Twitter, or email imagined.tomorrow@gmail.com.

Guests:

Subject experts

Dr. Jyoti Joshi, a medical doctor and the South Asia head of the Center For Disease Dynamics, Economics & Policy or CDDEP.

Dr. Prashanth N. Srinivas, a medical doctor and public health researcher at the Institute of Public Health, Bangalore.

Dr. Anand Anandkumar, CEO and MD of Bugworks, a Bangalore-based company that is developing a new class of antibiotics.

Others

Dumma (Maya Sengupta): My incredibly talented maternal grandmother, who tells me stories of her childhood, when she hadn’t even heard of antibiotics.

Episode music

Interlude music pieces by Alfred Castro, Oleksii Kaplunskyi, Zakar Walaha on Pixabay.

Episode artwork

Image of a carbapenem-resistant Klebsiella pneumoniae by NIAID, used under CC By 2.0 license.

For further reading:

Scoping Report on Antimicrobial Resistance in India. Read here.

More on Bugworks’ research

Explainer: Why Is Multi-Drug Resistance a Problem? Read here.

Thumbs-up to pneumococcal vaccine rollout across India. Read here.

Too much too often: Antibiotics in Indian crops can make them ineffective. Read here.