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Here's my colleague, Johnny Diamond.

They have saved countless lives and improved tens, maybe hundreds of millions more.

Antimicrobial drugs have transformed the health of humanity.

Some of the greatest advances in those drugs' development have been forged in wartime.

But now those same wars threaten the progress that's been made.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has led to the emergence of bacteria that are severely resistant

to multiple antibiotics.

A new dark age of drug resistance looms as antimicrobial drugs are prescribed in massive quantities

on the battlefield and to civilian casualties.

Today, the story of humanity's triumph over disease and how that is threatened by the wars we fight. With me today is Dominic Hughes, our global

health correspondent. Hello, Johnny. How are you?

It's just lovely to have you on the show. Thank you very much indeed. We are talking,

of course, about antimicrobial resistance. Can we start with where we were before we had drugs

like these, where we were, I guess, for civilians, but also where we were in wartime.

Yeah, so before antimicrobials were really discovered, life was essentially precarious.

Even a relatively minor infection could prove fatal.

So people say a paper cut could have killed you,

...