You're listening to the inquiry with me, Helena Merriman.

On today's program, we're going to do something a bit different.

Normally, as you regulars know, we bring you a new subject every week.

But today, we bring you part two and a special pair of

programs. Last week was part one and if you didn't hear the show you can listen to

it on our website or download the podcast. It was all about antibiotic resistance. We heard how we got

hooked on antibiotics and now people are going to the doctors with infections that

drugs simply can't treat. It's scary stuff and last week

after we finished putting the program together we found it hard to think about

anything else. So we didn't. We went back to antibiotics. But

this time we decided to look at what's being done to try to fix the mess we're in.

And so in today's show,

we've picked just a few of the things

that people are doing

to try to prevent the so-called antibiotics apocalypse.

Over the next 20 minutes, you hear about kamodo dragons, three-toed sloths, Dutch pigs,

and the amazing inner world of bacteria.

As we ask, how do we fix antibiotics.

Problem one, over prescribing. As we heard last week, after antibiotics were discovered, we became addicts.

And the more we took, the less effective they became.

Bacteria evolved, becoming ever more resistant,

and learned to outsmart the drugs. Logically then there's one very simple way to fix antibiotics.

...