Guest blogger and Acute Medicine trainee Dr Nicola Fawcett (bio below) writes…As the local Prophet of Antibiotic Resistance Doomsday to our population of hospital physicians, I’m always interested in finding out if the pan-drug-resistant superbug has emerged that is going to wipe us all out, for credibility purposes if nothing else. (Resistance Is Coming! Prepare thyself! Wash thy hands and document thy indication and duration or face Everlasting audits and perpetual personal protective equipment!). For the record – I’m actually a Registrar in Acute and General (Internal) Medicine. I’m doing some time in the world of ID/Micro/Genomics in the hope that it will help me work out whether it’s ok to just hand out co-amoxifrusiclavamide + nebs to everyone if not sure what’s going on. However  this question seems rather inextricably linked to antibiotic resistance, and having spent some time now with people who seem to know what they’re doing,  I’m increasingly flabbergasted at the massive divide between the views of microbiologists who see the latest data, and the views of the common garden hospital physician. Therefore my side-mission, if you like, has become to spread the good, or rather, spectacularly bad news that antimicrobial resistance is currently spreading around our biosphere at a scale and speed at which we simply cannot react fast enough.

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