This is the short edition of More or Less, first broadcast on the BBC World Service.

Hello and welcome to More or Less on the BBC World Service.

I'm Wesley Stevenson.

This week, the $40 billion market that nobody wants to get involved in.

It's a market where hundreds of thousands of units are shifted every week in every country in the world.

This market, antibiotics.

But the market in antibiotics is different from that of normal drugs and it doesn't follow the normal rules of supply and demand.

And this broken market is arguably one of the biggest reasons why antibiotics are now facing a crisis.

Because as the old ones become resistant, there aren't new ones to replace them.

And this problem is no more stark than in the case of the antibiotic group, Carbapenems, the go-to drug to treat serious infections in very sick patients.

It can be a matter of life and death.

This is Professor Alan Johnson, a microbiologist with the UK government body,

Public Health England.

With a critically all patient with sepsis or meningitis, if you don't get them on the appropriate

antibiotic quickly, more patients actually will die of the infections.

But each time we use an antibiotic it will kill most of

the bacteria causing the infection but sometimes an odd gene mutation in

the bacteria

multiply you then have a problem. A serious problem,

like CRE.

It actually stands for carbon penenem Resistent Enterobacteriacee. Enterobacteriacee relates to a large family of bacteria,

including bacteria such as E. coli and a top of bacteria called Klebsiella.

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